ON THE ROAD IN FRANCE

WINE, THEN WATER IN THE FRENCH WINTER

Statue of wine-makers in Burgundy village of Puligny-Montrachet.

This has been a very mobile week for someone who, least of all in winter, doesn’t travel a lot. First, I drove three hours from Paris to Beaune, in Burgundy, to spend some time exploring the wine country – and its wines – with a friend from the USA. Then I undertook, alone, another three-hour trip, this time by train, to Charente, on the Atlantic coast, where I’m writing this.

The visit to Beaune was something of a sentimental journey, since, more than thirty years ago, my French petite amie took me there for the first time. In a vintage store, we found the ‘twenties dress that, not long after, she wore for our wedding.

France isn’t a big country compared to the United States or my native Australia but the fact that its population, the same as Britain, is spread over five times the area reminds one that size is mostly a matter of scale. Once we left Paris behind, the sense I got from both these journeys was of emptiness. Watching kilometre after kilometre of deserted fields speeding by under vast skies, France seemed as limitless as the Russian steppes.

Paradoxically, the simplicity was elating. Kenneth Grahame in one of my favourite books, The Wind in the Willows, describes England’s winter landscape in almost identical terms.

“It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off ….He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset; the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.”

All the time I lived in Australia, I seldom escaped the sense that it existed at the bottom of a well. Somewhere up above, in what Oscar Wilde evoked as “that little tent of blue/Which prisoners call the sky”, was another world that I hungered to explore. I wanted cities and excitement, but now, having experienced them, what I enjoy most is the tranquil emptiness represented by that circle of sky; that sense of space.