Apr 27: Pic St Loup Wine Tour

 Wanting to get outside the city for a little adventure, Molly and I planned to take a tour in the wine-producing terraire of Pic St. Loup, north of Montpellier.  Our guide was a native of the area, spoke excellent English, and had keys to several of the wineries.  I learned a lot about how wine-making here differs from that in California (having spend a lot of time in the Napa, Sonoma, and Alexander Valleys of CA when we lived in San Francisco), tasted a fair number of wines, enjoyed a delicious lunch, and enjoyed the company of both our guide Bertrand and our fellow tourists, a family from Iceland.

Molly, Bertrand, and me at the winery where we spent the most time:

A section of original Roman road that was found in renovating the building that houses the winery's offices (it was VERY hard to avoid turning an ankle on the uneven stones!)

The vineyard at the winery:

And the view of the winery from above....

....where we turned 180 degrees for the view of Pic St.-Loup , the hill that gives the area its name.

Lunch at Bertrand's family's B&B:

And though you can't see them in this shot, there were several more tastes of wine with our meal...

On the way back to Montpellier we stopped at a beautiful medieval village for a brief walk.