Burgundian food is positively medieval in its neglect of dietary fads. Curnonsky described a typical daily menu for the dukes of Burgundy: leek soup with fat bacon, broth of verjus (cooking wine) with chicken, chicken hotpot, capon blancmange, suckling pig stuffed with garlic sauce, lamb and goat chitterlings, fricassee of frogs' legs, snails with butter and garlic, crawfish in aspic, wafers, pear comp?with rosewater, elderberry blossom fritters The Last Judgement could perhaps not come soon enough. On the first cycling day we have a guide to take us through the C?de Nuits, north of Beaune. A tentative start turning the wrong way up a sens unique, over the cobbles and through the undistinguished suburbs to Chorey-les-Beaune for a very early tasting with a peasant winemaker called Fran?s Gay, working in a large shed - a useful reminder that making wine is an agricultural activity Then back on the bikes. We cross the treacherous Route Nationale and onto what the guidebooks call La France sur les Routes Tranquilles (the title of a book I was consulting when I had my worst-ever car crash). This is D-road France: beautiful, empty, silent, green - perfect for biking. This fertility created extraordinary wealth: the historian Steven Runciman said the Burgundians who founded the nearby monastery at Cluny were the American Express of the Middle Ages.
The monks have no direct survivors - just their wine - but the sense of rurality and a reminder of voluntary vows of poverty is enforced by surviving Renault 5s which occasionally pass us, cars long since disappeared from French cities. It is a 60km backroads trip whose itinerary reads like an ambitious Carte des Vins: Aloxe-Corton, Pernand-Vergelesses, Cham- bolle-Musigny, Clos de Vougeot, Nuits-St Georges. For a decadent, sedentary, voluptuary I am quite fit, but some of the ascents make thigh muscles unexcited by mere running or tennis shudder with fatigue. At the end of one (which I nearly abandoned until I remembered The Last Judgement), the B&R guide (who has so far been diplomatically unintrusive) produces welcome dried fruit and water. We now cruise to lunch at Ch?teau Hotel Andr?iltener, a Swiss wine entrepreneur, at Chambolle-Musigny Here the bedrooms are named after Grand Cru wines. We sit outside in the sun, drink the wine of the same name, with good bread, jambon persill?and poulet en aspic The silence is astounding and beautiful. The next day we are on our own in the southerly C?de Beaune, bicycling through Orches (where they idiosyncratically insist on making a ros? the cliffs at Baubigny, La Rochepot, St Aubin, Puligny-Montrachet, Volnay, Meursault.
Our B&R hostess (having prudently discovered the only viable bar on our route is shut) intercepts us half way through the morning's ride with an ice-bucket of beer. The landscape to the * *south of Beaune is different - similar to the Jura, reminding you that Switzerland is not far away. Thigh-trembling ascents are followed by intoxicatingly delicious, long descents with farmyard smells. An hour later, the same hostess has moved her Volkswagen cabrio to La Pierre Qui Vire, a primeval stone table with a view. She spreads a form of perfection: briefly helmetless, we eat tarte aux poireaux, tarte au saumon, jambon persill? and crudit?followed by what you could call a Rabelais of cheeses: Epoisses, Bleu de Bresses, D?ces de Pommard and Gallette affinn?au marc.
