The Life of Cairanne

As we awoke this morning, it crossed our minds that it was September 11, a date that the world will never forget. Hopefully it’s an uneventful day. Our day was certainly uneventful, with a quick trip into Orange for a few essentials. The wind started blowing last night and with the chilly edge in the breeze, we’re going to guess that we have a Mistral blowing down the Rhone Valley from the Alps. This is historically a three day event, so we’ll see. To keep the blog going today, I decided to focus on the life of Cairanne, which, although it’s a small village, does have some commerce. So I did a circuit walk down from Chez Pigeon out of the Vieux Village, past an interesting stone wall, showing a home built into the bedrock.

As I hit the bottom of the hill - that was the easy part of the walk - the first business I came upon was La Petite Jeannette, which is a small and the only grocery store in the village. I picked up some hamburger buns here for tonight.

Across the street is the Boucherie la Cairannaise, a new butcher. This is a tough business to keep running in a small place like Cairanne. Hopefully this guy will keep it going.

The only restaurant, Le Tourne au Verre, is next, where one eats under the plane trees in agreeable weather. A meal here involves a choice of two prix fixe menus - that’s it. No a la carte. They have an excellent wine list, especially by the glass.

The Tabac/Presse sells typical tobacco store product and relevant newspapers and magazines. We haven’t found anything English here.

Across the street is the Cave du Belvedere, which is a wine store selling the wine of most producers of Cairanne wine. It’s a great one stop wine buying/tasting experience.

Down the street from them is the Bakery and the Cafe. We frequent the bakery, but have actually never been in the Cafe, which seems to do good business with the locals.

Another one hundred metres along the main street which is also a major highway, is the Cave de Cairanne. This is the wine cooperative for Cairanne but there are numerous wine producers with shops in and on the edge of the village. I didn’t get to them.

When we visit in September, the vendage (harvest) has usually begun, but due to an extremely unfavourable May weatherwise, there is no vendage action here and apparently won’t be for weeks, so the large grey garage doors that are usually open accepting farmer’s wagon loads of grapes are closed tight.

From the Cave I headed over the back gate - yeh I said over - and got this view of the the Vieux Village where Chez Pigeon is located. Looking carefully to the middle right of the picture one can see the end and side vine laden terraces of Chez Pigeon above the stone arch around the front of the home.

If you can’t make it out in that photo, then here is the closeup.

Walking back up the hill through the vineyards, I stopped occasionally to talk to the grapes and encourage them to ripen. I think that works, doesn’t it?

The figs don’t look like they liked May either and we noticed that neither olive tree at Chez Pigeon is bearing fruit. Gotta love global warming - NOT!!

The last huff and puff stretch of the climb to Chez Pigeon includes this view of the chapel and then the chapel including the house.

When I finally returned to the house I was greeted by two kitties who could care less that I had ever been away - Cecile and Corton. Welcome home! They do however like the new duck treats we bought them. Clearly, they are now French cats.