Dijon — Blog — The Towering Travelers

Dijon was a challenge after the never-ending activity of Paris, especially because we arrived on the Sunday of a holiday weekend. Dijon has about 150,000 inhabitants, but at the old city center where we were staying, at least two-thirds of the restaurants and shops were closed on Sunday and Monday. This turned out fine because we spent most of our time walking around anyway, but the transition to forced relaxation was a little difficult.

The fountain at Jardin Darcy, near our apartment (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Selling art at Jardin Darcy (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The white bear, one of the representative animals of Dijon (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Dijon is the capital of Bourgogne (Burgundy = Bourgogne in English) and was home to a line of four powerful dukes, rich in wine, who led Bourgogne to rival central France in power. The region lived as a separate state for many years. Dijon also has many animals woven into its history, and the city has adopted the owl as its spirit animal. The tourism board put little owl markers across old town, and for three euro you can buy a booklet that will guide you to see the different historical points of interest across the old city, which dates back to the 1000s. Unfortunately, I have learned to associate the old timber and stone construction with the new, fake facades at the Colorado Renaissance Festival, so it was a little difficult to fully appreciate the age of the medieval buildings.

Symbols of the Owl’s Trail (Photo/Nicole Harrison)

Cathedrale Saint-Bénigne (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Medieval architecture (Photo/Jason Rafal)

On Monday, we climbed the Tour Philippe Le Bon, followed the owls around the city, and visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, which was partially closed (everything is going to be opening up again in 2019) but led us through the history and culture of the Dukes of Burgundy.

The view from Tour Philippe Le Bon (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A gargoyle on top of Tour Philippe Le Bon (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (Photo/Jason Rafal)

A dog jumps into a fountain while accompanying its person on a run through the center of Dijon (Photo/Jason Rafal)

We also walked to the edge of the old city and found fountains, the lovely Jardin de l'Arquebuse, and the natural history museum, where we browsed halls of informational (but in French, so we didn’t learn much) placards and taxidermied animals.

A fountain on the edge of the old town (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Many cabinets of birds (Photo/Jason Rafal)

On Tuesday we went to the market in the morning and then walked around and went into some of the shops that had been previously closed. Bourgogne is known for its spiced bread, which we tried a few forms of. It ranged from a weird, spongey, air pocked-filled cookie to loaves of what was essentially soft, sweet fruitcake. Not surprisingly, some of the bread was shaped like owls.

Owl bread (Photo/Nicole Harrison)

On Tuesday afternoon we had a half-day tour through the Cote de Nuits with another Coloradan who was working from Paris for the summer, a couple from Japan, a woman from Taiwan, and our guide, Stevie. We drove a small VW van through the vineyards, stopping to talk about wine and vines as we went. Bourgogne produces about three percent of France’s wine, and the grapes used are overwhelmingly chardonnay and pinot noir. Unlike American wine, French wine is named for the region, not the grape variety, which makes it rather difficult to know what you’re buying unless you’re familiar with the regions of France. In addition, French wine has four classifications, called appellations, which describe the potential of the land to make a great wine (this is challenging to describe without a map, so bare with me). The first two are regional appellation, a designation which includes about 50% of Bourgogne wines and is usually grown lower on the hillsides, and village appellation, which is usually slightly upslope from the regional appellation area and represents about 30% of Bourgogne wine. Sometimes a certain village appellation is surrounded by a wall, or clos, which protects the grapes and allows the seller to list the designation of walled vineyard on the bottle, Premier Cru is the higher-quality wine produced in the areas that have more challenging conditions higher up on the slope. The most valued appellation is Grand Cru, which comes from the ideal point of the hillside and accounts for about 1% of the 3% of wine that comes from Bourgogne.

A walled vineyard (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Bourgogne has fields and fields of agriculture, but most of them are wheat and canola. Only some areas are used for the vineyards. The vineyards are also dotted with rosebushes, which provide a sort of canary in the coal mine to warn of impending molds and diseases (the rose plants will be affected before the vines). Bourgogne gets about 30 inches of rain a year, and it’s actually illegal to irrigate.

We went to a wine tasting in a cellar in a small town, where we drank six white and red wines of various appellation designations and compared them. We were guided in our tasting by Stevie, who had a great understanding of American mannerisms and made a lot of jokes. We paired the wine with some delicious cheeses and crackers.

The amazing wine cellar we visited first (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The older bottles of wine in the cellar (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Learning about labels (Photo/Jason Rafal)

From there, Stevie took us to the Château du Clos de Vougeot, which had traditionally been run by Cistercian monks. There were some incredibly large old wine presses that the monks used, one of which is still in use. The machine exerts about 20 tons of pressure on the grapes to sufficiently squish them. The room where they put the giant vats of grape juice to ferment has to be large and airy to prevent the offgassing CO2 from killing the people making the wine, so the ceilings were vaulted. The whole thing was rather impressive.

The exceptional vineyards of the Clos de Vougeot (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Very old winemaking equipment (still in use today) (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Decorations made from baskets formerly used to carry grapes (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After the French revolution, the vineyards were taken from the church and sold to private owners. The chateau is now run by a brotherhood, who produce some wine the way the monks had been doing it for centuries and rent out the beautiful medieval building for private parties and events.

Below are a few more random photos from our visit to Dijon.