Castles and cogs in the lovely Loire Valley
Take your family on your own Tour de France, with some low-speed pootling through the landscapes and flavours of the French heartland, writes
IUSED to cycle, in the days when it was just a thing normal human beings did, but I apparently missed the memo that went around to all the middle-aged men of my acquaintance saying that when we turned 40 we’d buy expensive road bikes and tear around Box Hill in fetish-wear shouting “Smash it!” to each other. Once, cycling held out the promise of being a universal human activity. When George Orwell wanted to evoke the spirit of eternal Britain, he spoke of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning”. Today, if they were cycling at all, they’d be carrying carbohydrate gels and boring on to each other about derailleurs and Strava segments.
It was refreshing, then, to hear the words of Rob, the friendly expatriate guide who was helping my wife Hannah onto her rented bicycle.
“A lot of our cyclists don’t touch a bike when they’re not on holiday,” he said, as we headed off for four days of low-speed pootling through the flat landscape of the Loire Valley.
At home I have an ancient three-speed Swedish army bike. It’s so heavy that, on the rare occasions when I’m pedalling uphill, it feels like my kneecaps are going to come off. Hannah doesn’t even own a bike. Rob reassured us that the route ahead was well within anyone’s capability. “We’ve had an eight-year-old complete it, and plenty of guests in their 70s and 80s,” he said. “Call me if you get stuck — but in the nicest possible way, I hope I don’t see you until the end of your holiday.”
We freewheeled out of the courtyard of the Château de Chissay, where we’d spent the night and eaten a delicious meal. It was the château of a fairy tale, all echoing donjons and ancient gargoyles. Below us gurgled the waters of the Cher, a wide, slow-moving tributary of the Loire. A breath of perfume rose from a tangle of sweet peas by the railway track. Just beyond Chisseaux, we took a path through a deep forest to an enchanting view of the Château de Chenonceau, whose two-storey bridge over the Cher is one of the emblematic images of the region. Mary Queen of Scots was a visitor here and her bodyguards left graffiti in English: “The ire of man workest not the justice of God” was still just legible in the plasterwork of the chapel. At that moment, I thought I felt the eerie breath of history on my neck, but it was Hannah.
“You’ve timed this stop all wrong,” she said. “We’ll never make it to Amboise for lunch.”
Rob had tried to make it as easy as possible: we had a foolproof route description and our luggage was being taken on ahead of us. But there was some baggage he couldn’t carry: the accumulated resentment of our being tired 21st-century parents, who hadn’t been on holiday without our children since Tony Blair looked young.
Hannah felt we had to go as quickly as possible so we wouldn’t suffer the vagaries of French opening hours. She recalled dire warnings from our briefing about the impossibility of finding a bakery open after 11am, or a restaurant serving lunch after 2pm. I felt sure Rob had said precisely the opposite: cycle slowly, take your time, it’s all about the journey.
As a compromise, we agreed to have lunch immediately. Just beyond the gates of Chenonceau, we locked our bikes outside the Hotel du Roy. We ordered the set menu, and from then on all bickering ceased. It was like the turning point of a romantic comedy. I credit the power of French gastronomy. That rosbif and potatoes seemed to mark the point when our holiday actually began. In a renewed spirit of conjugal amity, we set off to pedal through the vineyards of Touraine Chenonceaux.
At Amboise, we stopped to visit the Château du Clos Lucé, where Leonardo da Vinci settled in 1516 and spent the final three years of his life designing war machines and finishing the Mona Lisa. For the 500th anniversary of his arrival in France, the château has had a makeover. A ghostly Leonardo has been resurrected in his former studio by the magic of technology. Virtual and real recreations of his inventions are dotted around the château: a tank, his flying machine, a machine gun.
A few hundred metres away, on Rue Victor Hugo, we stumbled on the arresting sight of a man building a fullsized plane in his garage. Sixty-year-old Francois Jamois told us he’d been working on it for three years and was planning to take to the skies next year. “He’s a genius like Leonardo,” said his neighbour. That night, we pulled in to L’Aubinière at St-Ouen-lesVignes and were reunited with our luggage. The hotel is half traditional, half modern, with an atmosphere of Zeninflected calm. Before dinner, Hannah went to the spa — heavenly, apparently, where silence is compulsory.
Odile and Jacques Arrayet served us one of those meals that shines in your recollection like a warm memory from childhood: snails in beurre blanc, a plump fillet of basslike maigre fish, tangy Loire goat cheeses. Two pages into my book at bedtime, I felt my eyes closing; projected onto my lids was a virtual highlight reel of the day’s route: the path unspooling before us, through hazels and willows, past vineyards and ripening wheat.
French historians came up with the idea of the longue durée — the slow swell of ordinary life that keeps going under the chop and turbulence of the headlines. As we saddled up each morning, one of the things we looked forward to was the feeling of being immersed in the peaceful rhythms of rural life. We felt like privileged witnesses to odd vignettes: popping into a tabac for a pick-me-up at 11am to find the locals enjoying a glass of rosé; the man carrying red lupins to the graveyard like a character in Jean de Florette.
The gentle exercise sharpened our appetites. And every hour or so, we passed a sign inviting us to break our journey with a wine tasting. Just outside Onzain, we popped into Domaine de Rabelais, where Cedric Chollet’s family have been making wine since 1720. It had begun to rain and Cedric welcomed us in, wiped the table, laid out a map and gave us a quick lesson on the region’s viticulture. He poured a few glasses of wine from the tiny appellation of Touraine Mesland. The whites were spankingly sharp, all lemons and green apples from the chenin grape.
A more hi-tech proposition came at the Maison des Vins de Cheverny. It sits just opposite the Château de Cheverny — the model for Captain Haddock’s ancestral home in Tintin. We paid à3 (R44) for a tasting glass with a silicon chip that lets you try seven of 80-odd wines from a series of dispensers.
“I think I might be one of those super noses,” said Hannah, swirling a red wine around her glass. I’m not qualified to judge; but on the off-chance that she is, it’s probably worth giving her tasting notes for the pinot-noirbased 2011 Domaine des Huards Ouvrage in full: We’re peasants. We’ve got something on the fire. There’s a big bowl of soup. Merlin might have drunk this.
Earlier on our tour, we’d stopped for a wine-tasting at the Caves du Père Auguste, in a limestone cellar just outside Chenonceau.
“There is no word in English to express the concept of terroir,” the young woman said as she filled our glasses. The concept of terroir has always struck me as a bit farfetched. Can anyone really taste limestone soil, a southfacing slope and the decision to farm biodynamically?
Yet beneath the idea of terroir is a profound association of landscape and flavour. And those are the things that linger in my memory of the Loire: the zing of the wines and cheeses, the crusty bread; the unfurling river, the quiet roads, the dried safflower stalks rattling in the wind; the wines maturing slowly in the limestone caves; the rural courtesy and patience with our inadequate French; Hannah smacking her lips at the cheeseboard.
Come to think of it, the one gap in my recollection is the bicycle. I think it was silver and had 18 gears, or possibly 21. But then, as someone once said, it’s not about the bike. — © The Daily Telegraph
Each morning, we looked forward to being immersed in the rhythms of rural life