I usually spend my special holidays at a particular inn out here in Virginia but this New Years, Johnny Softball and I decided we would try something different. He had been to the Inn at Meander Plantation once before about 7 years ago for New Year’s and really enjoyed it and suggested we’d try as long as I had no problem that he had been there in the past. I had no issue and immediately hopped on the website and did some research and liked what I saw.

The Inn at Meander Plantation is a full service bed and breakfast with a restaurant on site. I was excited that they only served Virginia wine and was dying to see the wine list. I looked and saw that they had not updated in probably about 5-6 years (most whites were 2002 and reds were mostly 2000-2003) but if they still served only Virginia wines I would be happy. We planned to arrive New Year’s eve and leave the next day. I could not wait to book a room and a dinner reservation.

Once we decided we were going we tried to book our room. The website posted that there is a two night minimum and dinner at their restaurant at lease one night.  I was assuming there wouldn’t require the second night stay if their restaurant wasn’t open New Year’s Day.  Johnny Softball agreed that I should call the next day and make the reservation over the phone. I called and found out that the restaurant would not be open New Year’s Day. I asked the inn keeper if she would waive the two night minimum this time since they were closed as was every other nice restaurant in downtown Culpeper. Her response was “Well I bet the Chili’s in Culpeper will be open”. My mouth fell open. She expected me to pay $220 a night to stay and then eat at Chili’s. Not my idea of a special weekend out in the country.  I hung up without making a reservation and pretty upset at the lack of customer service. She also suggested I change my dates of arrival if I had an issue with eating at Chili’s. I immediately called Johnny Softball, who is always quick to give someone a second chance, he booked the room online for two nights and said we would bring lights snacks along with wine for Sunday evening.

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For those that are counting, the trip to Chamonix was Day Trip 3, I just forgot to include that in the title.  This really is Day Trip 4 and it was the longest journey by car that we took the entire time we were in France. However, since Chateauneuf du Pape is the heart of the Southern Rhone wine region, we felt that we owed it to ourselves to make the journey there. After all, who knows when were going to get a chance to do this again?

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Nestled into a valley in the Alps Mountains near where the borders of Switzerland and Italy are, there lies a jewel of a a village called Chamonix. It is at the base of Mont Blanc and it has all the charm one would expect from an Alpine skiing village. With fantastic vistas spread out no matter which direction you look, this is a postcard perfect place for capturing those moments you would like to last forever.

It was here that I got savor two treasures of the French culinary tradition, crepes and fondue.

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After our trip to the Northern Rhone, we decided that we needed to take a day to just chill around the chateau and catch up on some of the wine we had purchased. However, we had noticed a little shop down the road called “La Grotte Aux Fromages” or “The Cheese Cave” in English. Considering that we had a love affair with the local cheeses that rivaled our passion for wine (well, maybe not quite so much) I felt that we were honor bound to pay this place a visit.

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So I had downloaded these maps from the Official Tourism Site of the Vineyards of the Rhone Valley, and I was hoping that they would lead me to the cool and groovy places to check out in the Rhone wine region. The first issue I had was not with the maps, but with something that I didn’t really think about when planning this trip, almost all the highways in France are toll roads. The roads are in beautiful shape, not a pothole to be found, but it did cost me almost 20 Euro in tolls for the hour and a half drive to the Northern Rhone.

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The chateau that we were staying at was approximately one and a half hours from the Rhone wine region and it was one of our major goals while were were in France to get there. However, wine is made just about everywhere in France and we figured that we should sample the local fare before heading out to the more well known places.

The region that the chateau is located in is called Savoie (pronounced sah-vwah by the locals) and upon the advice of the Equestrian Queen, we headed up to the little village of Chignin (shin- yin) in search of local wine.

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For those of you that haven’t been to Europe before, you should know that most flights consist of an overnight journey. You leave here some time late afternoon, say 5:58 PM, and you arrive at a destination like Geneva, Switzerland at something like 7:02 AM. And it is still dark outside. This of course meant that even in spite of copious amounts of drinking on the plane, was unable to get more than slight fits and starts of sleep. That meant that our first day in France required us to push on through with minimal sleep.

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About six months ago, the Equestrian Queen and I were chatting about something completely unimportant and most likely trivial as well, when the subject of France came up. This is when she mentioned that her brother had a chateau over there and that we might be able to make use of it some time. I thought that was a smashing idea and told her that she should look into it, all the time believing that this was one of those super ideas that never really gets off the ground. Fast forward six months to the last weeks of October and Ms Cocktail and I are on of eight couples all in various states of travel, heading to this chateau nestled in the heart of the Rhone Alps in a tiny village called St Jean de la Porte.

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