St. Remy Market

Wednesday is the market day for St. Remy.  It is a far cry from the market on Monday in Cavaillon.  The wares range from antiques and art to handmade furniture to tablecloths to cheese and sausage to oysters to fruit and vegetables and everything else in between.  And, it all appears to be high quality.  We wandered through the streets of the center of town stopping to sample before purchasing olives, cheese and sausage.  Allan and I are bringing home tablecloths–one for Poplarville and one for New Orleans–and two more cigales for the kitchen in New Orleans.  It was cold so we each bought a soft, warm woolen scarf.  Connie and Clay bought paella, oysters, artichokes and everything else we might need for lunch and dinner.

The mistral is gusting today causing cool, clear and beautiful weather.  The mistral blows down the Rhone and through Provence to the Mediterranean around the Camargue often resulting in sudden storms in the sea.  This wind is helpful after a big rain because it dries the grapes which makes them happy!

After lunch, we took a quick ride to the coliseum in Arles to pick up our bullfight tickets for next weekend.  We think the tickets will get us into a Spanish-style bullfight on Saturday where they kill the bull with horns and the French-style bullfight where the cowboy takes a rosette from a young bull’s horn.  I expect to like the French-style much better…more next weekend.

Leaving Arles, we decided to follow Clay’s lead and he took us to a beautiful and relatively new winery just past St. Remy on the way to Cavaillon, Chateau Romanin.  The cave (cellar) is located below the ruins of a castle from the middle ages,  built into the side of a mountain and designed like a cathedral.  In building the cellar, great care was taken to not disturb the mountain (in the right photo below, the wine casks are against the rock of the mountain).  By building the cellar in this way, the wine stays consistently at 10 degrees Celsius all year round.

The winery’s motto is “fruit de la terre, du soleil, et de la lune…” —fruit of the earth, the sun and the moon.  They take all of these into consideration in the entire wine production process.  Following a tasting, we purchased two bottles of red and a bottle of white, some glass corks and a “drop stop.”  It was a beautiful facility and the entire 58 hectare estate appears to be well thought out.  In addition to the grape vines, there were cultivated almond trees and olive trees as well as wild scrub oak and small native shrubs and flowers, including wild thyme, rosemary, and cyste.

Dinner tonight was at L’Aile ou la Cuisse Bistrot and was excellent.  It is a small restaurant up an alleyway from the town center.  The entire menu is in French so after trying hard to read it using the little we know, we gave in and asked the waiter to help…which he did with a lovely smile.  Our walk home was uneventful and we arrived at Bleu to the calling of frogs and a beautiful starlit evening.

Bon nuit!

Nancy