The picture is of a previous year's tasting at St. Martin des Champs

10/20 Monday

Rise late. Not too late. I dressed and headed down the street to check out the neighborhood on my way to our favorite patisserie, just two blocks and one morning cigarette away. There have been a few changes. The charcuterie (butcher shop) down the way is gone, apparently in the process of being converted to a dwelling. The two banks along the way have also left, one to a more prominent spot along the D14, the main drag, so I did manage to pick up some euros at the ATM. The Bonne Humeur, the half-decent café also on the D14, has a new sign that touts wood-fire pizza, kabobs, and other goodies. We’ll have to give it a try. On the way back to our house I discovered that the alternate patisserie, the one that we use the day that our favorite is closed, has also disappeared to be replaced by yet another pizza shop. It seems a bit seedier than the Bonne Humeur so we’ll save it for an emergency.

I picked up our morning baguette and pain au chocolat and a nasty little chocolate thingamabob for my belated birthday dessert, then home for a breakfast of bacon sandwiches along with all of that good chocolaty stuff for me. Cathey just watches and giggles. Then off to the Champion for more supplies.

We’d arranged a meeting with our property managers, Ina and Dom George, whom we’d never seen in person. Rob, the guy who'd been our manager since the beginning, has left the south, and his wife/partner and her kids, and gone back to being a cabbie in London. Small wonder. Rob was a nice guy but with a short attention span - long on ideas and short on execution.

Ina and Dom showed up on time, very un-Languedocian. Nice young couple. He’s a Brit. She’s German. It turns out that the washer was a spare of theirs. So far, no charge. For that, we decided not to ask why we had to pay 65 euros for the cleaning after our last guests left just a couple of weeks ago and another 45 euros for prepping for our arrival. They are arranging for someone to work on the satellite dish for us. In the meantime, Dom told us the times that one of the French stations gives the weather.

After Ina and Dom left, I pulled two more socks out of our washer, left by the crazy American women who also managed to forever stain the cover of the click-clack and break one of the dining room chairs. Ina said that she had watched the repairman pull out a sock that had fallen between the tub of the washer and the casing and she thought that she could replicate the process. When she discovered that the machine didn’t work, she also discovered that she couldn’t figure out how the repair man had done his thing. So instead of calling the repairman again, she and Dom just brought over their spare. Since I figured out how to open the drum up and I think that I’ve tracked down all of the errant socks, I’ll call to see if we can arrange to hook our old machine back up for one last test.

Later in the afternoon, Cathey and I went off to investigate two new wineries that I researched on the internet after seeing them in Wine Spectator, both quite close to the house on the road to Cessenon sur Orb, the next town north on the D14. The first, Chateau Cazal Viel, has been in the family of Laurent Miquel since the French Revolution. He manages 150 hectares, primarily in viognier and syrah. In the literature, Laurent claims that he had no intention of taking up the family trade and trained as a mechanical engineer with advanced degrees. It seems, though, that these guys always end up back on the terroir.

Our host for our tasting, a young man with good English, was chatty and knowledgeable, impressed that we’d read about them in the Spectator and that we made appropriate comments about the various wines we were sampling. This place is a good find – not the cheapest but we already have a couple of places in hand for good, cheap sipping wine. One viognier, aged 100% in oak, was particularly interesting. We’ll take a bottle back for Liz, Cathey’s sister and our personal sommelier. We bought a case (six bottles) of various bottles of rose and viognier ranging in price from 5.9 to 16 euros.

Domaine de la Bousquette was our second stop. Because it’s a Mom and Pop operation, the website asks that you call ahead to arrange a tasting. We called and discovered that Pop didn’t speak English so we waited for Mom to arrive. She eventually did, breathless, having had to chase down an escaped donkey. We’ve noticed that several local wineries keep donkeys on premises but haven’t had the nerve to ask why donkeys are essential to proper vinification.

Typical of a number of new wineries, Bousquette is the small holding of a young couple who have dreams of creating THE local boutique biologique (organic) wine. Somehow, one of their vintages came to the attention of the Spectator. We didn’t find anything too exciting about our tasting but bought two bottles of red to be polite – one to drink now, one to cellar and check in a couple of years. That’s the chance that you take with the reds here in the Languedoc. They are seldom drinkable fresh but they often round out after a couple of years. Choosing the ones that are likely to do so is the sport of it.

Home for dinner – pork chops on the barbecue – and another early night.

10/21 – 22 Tuesday & Wednesday

Two relatively uneventful days with a few highlights.

We went to one of our standby wineries – St. Martin des Champs, where donkeys are also prevalent – for some of their cheap rose. Lo and behold, their rose won a medal this year and they had all of five bottles left. We took them all and added a bottle of chardonnay, also a medal winner, to round out the case. All at 5 euros a bottle.

We then made our way to Beziers to shop at a couple of big department stores called hypermarkets for simple kitchen tongs for Cathey. These are places that sell everything from computers and televisions to kitchen appliances and motor scooters and have massive grocery departments as good as any supermarket in the States complete with fresh produce, meats, seafood and the like. No go on the tongs in the hypermarkets, but we found what Cathey was looking for in the horrid little discount store down the road from us outside Cazouls that features all of the tacky garbage money can buy. Go figure. And nobody seems to sell cast iron skillets. We did find a nice little brass coat rack for the downstairs in the Castorama…a Home Depot clone...good news since it gave me an excuse to buy a power drill and bits. Manly tools. I put them to immediate use hanging the coat rack in the entrance room and a small towel hanger in the downstairs wc.

We stopped at Le Patio in Nissan-lez-Enserune for lunch on Tuesday, the little restaurant that Philippe and Bernadette Sans opened a couple of years back. They’re the proprietors of the Hotel Residence, the little hotel that we stayed in on our first visit to the Languedoc region of southern France. Because it was another warm, sunny day we ate outside on the patio. I had one of those really thin crust French pizzas with anchovies. Cathey had a seafood salad. We asked and were told that the spice in the avocado sauce that they gave Cathey for the seafood was pepper from Espelette, a picturesque little town in Basque country that we explored on our trip last year – white houses with red trim and strings of red peppers drying as they hang like ivy on the outside of the houses.

On our way out of Le Patio, we ran into the Sans’. They recognized us immediately and explained to all present that I was the food writer from America who had taken pictures of our meal at the Hotel Residence and written them up. Bernadette even remembered that one of the pictures was of salmon tartare. We made dinner reservations for the restaurant at the hotel on the spot, trying for Friday but they close on Friday night. Odd. Perhaps because the dining room is generally full with hotel guests on Friday night. Or perhaps, because we think that the hotel may be primarily a tradesman’s stopover, because that’s the night that it’s empty. Who’s to say? We’ll go Saturday night.

We had lunch Wednesday at Les Agape, the local restaurant in Cazouls that changed hands a couple of years ago and, to our way of thinking, went downhill trying to go upscale. The chef/owner is a fair cook, not in Philippe Sans’ league, who buddies up with the guests and has upped the prices beyond reasonable for the quality of his fare. He may be doing alright though as he’s the only real restaurant in town and the place that folks go for weddings and confirmations and such. The daily specials turned out to be reasonable. Cathey had a leek flan with a little marinated mushroom salad on the side followed by a nice haunch of rabbit in a light garlic sauce. Overcooked veggies, though. I had a fair plate of steak/frites.

I know that I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about food. Well, that’s the way it goes. We eat, we shop, we check out a winery or two, we eat, we shop, and we come home and eat. What’s a vacation for if not for a bit of over consumption?

Since the crazy Americans who committed attempted murder on our washer also broke one of our dining chairs, we were in the market and found a similar chair advertised for cheap in a flyer from a store called Leclerc. There’s supposed to be one in Beziers and one in Narbonne. After lunch, we tried to locate the Leclerc in Beziers. After an hour of driving around where we thought it would be – and stopping in a couple of stores where we found similar chairs for three times the cost of the ones in the flyer – we gave up and went home.