Satirical website The Daily Mash ran a story last week that read: “Tour de France reaches infamous wine-tasting stage … Following 12 intense stages of cycling, much of the peloton came unstuck on the punishing 13th stage on the Route des Grands Crus through the Burgundy region.”
It was perfect comedy timing. I had just returned from a cycling trip to Burgundy, so jokes about Chris Froome “pushing through the cheese wall” and taking “the wine-stained jersey on to the next stage” struck a chord.
To prepare for my weekend of rolling through some of the most prestigious vineyards on the planet, I’d studied the stage map – the Route Touristique des Grands Crus de Bourgogne. Over three days, I reckoned I’d easily be able to spin up and down the 63km corridor of grapes from Santenay to Dijon, stopping off for free tastings of wines whose names I had only ever seen at the expensive end of a menu.
In the southern Côte de Beaune region, I’d hoover up some Puligny-Montrachet and Pommard. In the Côte de Nuits region to the north, I’d lay waste to Nuits-Saint-Georges and Clos de Vougeot. It was to be a bucket list of sorts, and a bucketful of wine that would hopefully turn me into some sort of connoisseur by Monday morning. There would be no spitting.
That was the plan – until I met up with Tom Kevill-Davies. A thirtysomething Englishman, Tom runs cycling food-and-wine tours of Burgundy from his newly opened lodge in the village of Auxey-Duresses. As he sauntered up the steps of Beaune railway station to meet me off the train from Lyon, everything in Tom’s easygoing demeanour – stubble, shorts, shades and flip-flops – told me this wasn’t going to be a fly-by tour of the elite estates. I’d half been expecting to be greeted by an upturned collar and a flash of Burgundy moleskin.
Tom’s route to Burgundy has been circuitous. He grew up in East Anglia, studied product design, and worked in a variety of jobs before jacking it all in to cycle from New York to Rio de Janeiro. The 12,000-mile journey took two years, so he’s obviously not a man to be hurried. Then, sitting at a desk in Tooting Library, he wrote a book about his adventures. Specifically, he wrote about what he’d eaten en route.
“I wanted to find the perfect meal in the Americas and, thanks to my bicycle, I was able to find it time and again. I ate where the locals were eating. Markets, homes, the street, the beach, campfires and truck stops. Moose burgers in Canada, Dungeness crab in Oregon, tripe at a smoky taco stand in southern Mexico, hot pupusas (thick filled tortillas) in the backstreets of San Salvador.”
When he was on a beach in Mexico, Tom hatched a plan to start a business combining his passions for cycling, eating and drinking in a place where he thought he could live. Which was France. “Cycling and food are one of the great French double acts,” he said. He made a sketch of his dream home, which he said looks “spookily” like the lodge he has just finished renovating in Auxey-Duresses. Alongside it, he wrote: “A place where people can come and relax, eat, cycle and drink wine.”
A designer’s eye for detail clearly informed that sketch, and it has taken two years to convert the near-derelict 17th-century water mill and former village campsite into something like a cycling enthusiast’s blueprint.
The Hungry Cyclist Lodge opened three months ago as a secluded retreat on the edge of the village in the heart of Burgundy. It’s surrounded by woods, orchards, vineyards, a garden bordered with wild flowers and a small vegetable plot. The deck at the back commands views over regimented rows of vines that run down from the hills. It sits over a water race that trickles through the garden, providing a soothing soundtrack to a glass or two of chardonnay or sparkling crémant produced by Tom’s wine-making neighbour, Michel Prunier. At the front, there’s a swimming pool to plunge into after a hot, dusty day in the saddle.
Inside the lodge, a large sitting room with a wood-burner opens on to a country-style kitchen to one side and a reading room to the other, with five en suite bedrooms over two floors. The feel of the place is modern and light, but it’s relaxed and made homely by Tom’s eclectic finds from local brocantes (flea markets), vide-greniers (boot sales) and at the local recycling centre. There’s a Victorian cabinet displaying an array of stuffed birds, vintage advertising prints, signage, cycling cartoons, Tour de France programmes and cycling miniatures.
“I wanted to create an environment that would be welcoming to families, couples, cycling enthusiasts and wine aficionados. A home from home that would allow anyone to discover the region through its good food, wines and unique landscape,” Tom said.
We made forays into that landscape over the next three days, cycling on narrow roads through impeccably tidy parcels of manicured vines, covering no more than 40-50km in a day under a baking sun.
One of the things that distinguishes Burgundy from the other great wine-producing regions, such as Bordeaux, is the relatively small size of the estates. The average holding is six-to-eight acres and they are owned and worked by families over generations. These are still smallholders, albeit very asset-rich smallholders, because of the quality and price of their land.
In the Côte d’Or region – the heartland of Burgundy, which encompasses Côte de Beaunes and Côte de Nuits – there are 3,000 independent winemakers producing thousands of wines, all of which taste different depending on the terroir: the subtle differences in soil, slope and climatic exposure. The terroir can change from one side of the road to the other and can dramatically affect the quality – and the price – of the wine.
Tom would casually drop nuggets of information like this into our conversation as we rolled from one beautifully preserved stone village to another, from one coffee and croissant stop to our daily end-of-ride beer in the square overlooking the town hall in Meursault. Since landing in Burgundy four years ago, he has tried to immerse himself in the local culture and has worked the grape harvests in Gevrey-Chambertin to try to understand the complexities of the local viniculture.
The highlight of our three weekend rides took us to the wine capital of Burgundy – Beaune – where we visited the Hospices de Beaune, a former charitable hospital that is considered one of the finest examples of French 15th-century architecture. It is also one of the largest vineyard owners in the region. Every November, a three-day festival celebrating the food and wines of Burgundy surrounds the auction of its wines, run by Christie’s. It also houses the extraordinarily beautiful Rogier van der Weyden Last Judgement altarpiece.
We stopped in at the Saturday market to buy supplies for a picnic – bread, a slab of comté and local époisses cheeses. At charcuterie Maison Raillard, we bought a hunk of jambon persillé (jellied ham with parsley) and a wedge of torte beaunoise (a Beaune pork pie).
The wines to accompany this typical Burgundy fare were to be sourced from a tasting day in the vineyards around Volnay, a few miles up the road. We cycled to the village, paid €14 to drink from and keep an empty wine glass, and then walked between two marquees set up amid the vines and sampled around 20 pinot noirs, ranging from vins villages to premier crus. All were smooth and toothsome – as would be expected. But nothing about these tastings was at all elitist. Instead, the atmosphere was more village fete, and a horse-drawn calèche was on standby to ferry tipsy tasters back up the hill. Back in the village square, sitting on a wall overlooking the vineyards and the Saône valley beyond, we set about our picnic before wobbling back home on our bikes to the lodge.
This was but the curtain-raiser to the main event of the day. In the evening, we walked down to the church in Auxey-Duresses for a party to celebrate the feast day of Saint John the Baptist and the recent summer solstice. The whole village turned out, drinking local wines for knock-down prices of €12 for a bottle or €2 for a glass of extremely good crémant, chardonnay and pinot noir. We ate steak and frites at communal banquets while a brass band played a mix of jazz, blues and traditional songs. At the end of the evening, a bonfire of old vine roots was lit and kids wheeled around it on their bikes while the band played on.
On my final evening, following a day cycling alongside the canal and a leisurely lunch of kidneys braised in red wine and a bottle of Mercurey at Au p’tit Kir restaurant in Saint-Léger-sur-Dheune, Tom brought out the big guns. He cooked a huge rib of local Charolais beef over the embers of some old vine trunks, picked a lettuce from his garden and delivered a perfect last supper on the deck – a smoky taste of the Burgundy landscape accompanied by a bottle of Volnay Premier Cru.
“I want to give guests a taste of local life. I cook things that Burgundians eat at home, simple food sourced from the local farms or butchers, with what’s grown in the garden,” he said.
After only three days of touring the most expensive vineyards in the world on a bike, I remain a wine ignoramus. But I now have a small appreciation of what goes into producing Burgundy wines. And I have enjoyed a glimpse and taste of the local life that only comes with slowly travelling through a landscape on two wheels with a good local host.
• The Hungry Cyclist Lodge (thehungrycyclist.com) offers tailor-made or self-guided cycling tours. Doubles from €125 B&B, single occupancy €85. Evening meal or lunch on request. Bike hire €20 a day; road and electric bikes cost a little more
