Wheelie delicious

Nowhere in France is the food and wine so exalted and so evenly matched as in Burgundy. Stephen Bayley works up a thirst on a luxury cycling tour of this aristocratic fief

Most people associate Beaune with wine, but with me it's transport. I started my années de pelérinage in this lovely part of France soon after university. My car at the time was a Citroën Dyane Weekend, a lightly modernised deux chevaux, but retaining the original's antique charm and performance. My waggish friends said it was called Weekend because it took two days to get anywhere. They were right - I used to sleep in it, which is even more tormenting than it sounds as the seats didn't recline. I used a chinagraph marker to write directions straight on to the windscreen, so as to preserve patiently acquired momentum by avoiding map stops. Once, I replaced a broken throttle cable with a wire coat-hanger.

Times change. I have just driven to Beaune in an Audi A8 diesel, a four-litre, four-wheel drive, aluminium masterpiece. It has third generation sat-nav with intelligent graphics, although not everything is perfect. Programme the French destination while still in London and a voice helpfully tells you: "Caution: Channel crossing en route."

We took the submarine train prudently avoiding accidental immersion, then sat down for five hours of autoroute. In my Citroën days, the A26 east of Paris, past Laon by Reims and then southwards, did not exist. Then it opened almost secretly and for a while it was like having a private autoroute. The A26 is not now as quiet as it used to be: the solemn obligations of European overnight freight distribution give trucks a droit du seigneur over the outside lane, in their opinion if not mine. It really does not matter how many horsepower you have when the path ahead is blocked by an Iveco Stralis passing a 50-tonne Man Euro4 with a speed differential that only sensitive scientific instruments could detect.

But my purpose in Burgundy is another sort of transport: the bicycle. The Canadian specialist in active travel, Butterfield & Robinson, wants to experiment on me. They have been organising bicycling in Beaune for American clients since 1980, but I am here to test if the formula works on the English. B&R does bespoke holidays for the sort of client who says I want to bike with 20 friends from Venezuela to Ecuador with helicopter transfers for the bags... and has a budget as impressive as his whim.

The Burgundy package is less ambitious: an appealing combination of stiff exercise in the hilly wine country of the Cote d'Or, mediated by plentiful tastings en route together with as many lunches and dinners as social convention and the 24-hour clock allow. The travelling gastronome, Curnonsky (a great influence on the philosophy of the Michelin Rouge) called Burgundy "the paradise of paradises": there is no part of France where the quality of the food and wine is (traditionally, at least) so exalted and so evenly matched.

The voiturier at Beaune's Hotel Cep (promoted from an earlier and less dignified occupation, where he was required to pose in medieval dress for the brochure) whooshes the hot, fly-spattered Audi into the cool, dark garage, leaving us to contemplate our Paradise Express. The pair of Canadian-built Rocky Mountain hybrid bikes are immaculately maintained by a matching pair of dedicated mechanics, beaming at us malevolently in the hotel's 17th-century courtyard.

But that's for tomorrow. First, since the entire history, economy and culture of Beaune is based on wine, since the whole city is built on ancient undercrofts of perfumed, mossy cellars, since the educated appreciation and dedicated consumption of wine is an unnegotiable assumption of daily existence here, a short essay on Kir.

This is the traditional aperitif of the region. Named for Canon Kir, Mayor of Dijon, the mustard capital 30km north of Beaune, Kir is a mixture of crème de cassis (whose best source is the village of Echevronne) with simple aligoté white wine. Before Chardonnay became the aristocratic white wine grape of Burgundy in the 19th century, the uncomplicated, often harsh, aligoté dominated. Cheek-puckering if unadulterated, when mixed with sweet blackcurrant syrup aligoté is rapidly promoted.

The B&R philosophy is based on a mixture as deceptively simple as a well-balanced Kir: meticulous organisation delivered with studious informality. On the first night, a walking tour. I am not of a collaborative disposition and feared this might replicate those terrible guided tours of Tangier, except here the threat was not being pressured into buying a Berber rug, rather a shower curtain at the electro-ménager: but my anxieties were misplaced. Our guide took us to a secret Beaune. We approached, for instance, the famous Hotel Dieu from its unknown back and stood in a hauntingly quiet garden. God's Hospital is a magnificent Burgundian architectural setpiece, with trademark polychrome roof tiles.

It is the scriptural home of Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to Philippe le Bon, Duc de Bourgogne, Grand Duc d'Occident, and his wife Guigonne de Salins, faces familiar in donor panels from Netherlandish altarpieces that have migrated all over Europe. Inside the Hotel Dieu is the greatest altarpiece of them all : Rogier van der Weyden's Last Judgement, a spectacular admonition of worldly vanity and a scary premonition of destiny. St Michael, traditionally in art a beautiful, but severe, young man with an angel's wings - Milton's "celestial armies prince" - weighing risen souls in a balance is an image once seen, never forgotten. The altarpeice was commissioned by Rolin who, with a mixture of piety and opportunism, disguised the enjoyment and expression of great riches as charity: some whispered about misappropriation of funds. In the donor panel, a kneeling Rolin prays for his salvation. The Hotel Dieu elegiacally retains the function of an old people's home. Maybe to the residents, a kir offers some temporary comfort against the prospect of St Michael's imminent calculations.

Ramparts define Beaune's civic character. Here George Butterfield, founder of B&R, has bought a superb pavilion in a private green and bosky walled garden, reminiscent in mood of Bassano's novel about the Finzi-Continis. The pavilion is semi-ruined, but B&R have a pleasantly eccentric plan to turn it into a single-bedroom hotel. Right now, it is used as a picnic spot for the clients, returning from a walk; a glass of Crémant, the sparkling wine of Burgundy, casse-croute, gougères (regional cheese puffs), pain d'épices, rather more Crémant. All this before dinner.

Burgundian food is positively medieval in its neglect of dietary fads. Curnonsky described a typical daily menu for the dukes of Burgundy: leek soup with fat bacon, broth of verjus (cooking wine) with chicken, chicken hotpot, capon blancmange, suckling pig stuffed with garlic sauce, lamb and goat chitterlings, fricassee of frogs' legs, snails with butter and garlic, crawfish in aspic, wafers, pear compôte with rosewater, elderberry blossom fritters. The Last Judgement could perhaps not come soon enough.

On the first cycling day we have a guide to take us through the Côte de Nuits, north of Beaune. A tentative start turning the wrong way up a sens unique, over the cobbles and through the undistinguished suburbs to Chorey-les-Beaune for a very early tasting with a peasant winemaker called François Gay, working in a large shed - a useful reminder that making wine is an agricultural activity. Then back on the bikes.

We cross the treacherous Route Nationale and onto what the guidebooks call La France sur les Routes Tranquilles (the title of a book I was consulting when I had my worst-ever car crash). This is D-road France: beautiful, empty, silent, green - perfect for biking.

This fertility created extraordinary wealth: the historian Steven Runciman said the Burgundians who founded the nearby monastery at Cluny were the American Express of the Middle Ages. The monks have no direct survivors - just their wine - but the sense of rurality and a reminder of voluntary vows of poverty is enforced by surviving Renault 5s which occasionally pass us, cars long since disappeared from French cities.

It is a 60km backroads trip whose itinerary reads like an ambitious Carte des Vins: Aloxe-Corton, Pernand-Vergelesses, Cham- bolle-Musigny, Clos de Vougeot, Nuits-St Georges. For a decadent, sedentary, voluptuary I am quite fit, but some of the ascents make thigh muscles unexcited by mere running or tennis shudder with fatigue. At the end of one (which I nearly abandoned until I remembered The Last Judgement), the B&R guide (who has so far been diplomatically unintrusive) produces welcome dried fruit and water. We now cruise to lunch at Châ- teau Hotel André Ziltener, a Swiss wine entrepreneur, at Chambolle-Musigny. Here the bedrooms are named after Grand Cru wines. We sit outside in the sun, drink the wine of the same name, with good bread, jambon persillée and poulet en aspic. The silence is astounding and beautiful.

The next day we are on our own in the southerly Côte de Beaune, bicycling through Orches (where they idiosyncratically insist on making a rosé), the cliffs at Baubigny, La Rochepot, St Aubin, Puligny-Montrachet, Volnay, Meursault. Our B&R hostess (having prudently discovered the only viable bar on our route is shut) intercepts us half way through the morning's ride with an ice-bucket of beer. The landscape to the * *south of Beaune is different - similar to the Jura, reminding you that Switzerland is not far away. Thigh-trembling ascents are followed by intoxicatingly delicious, long descents with farmyard smells. An hour later, the same hostess has moved her Volkswagen cabrio to La Pierre Qui Vire, a primeval stone table with a view. She spreads a form of perfection: briefly helmetless, we eat tarte aux poireaux, tarte au saumon, jambon persillée, and crudités followed by what you could call a Rabelais of cheeses: Epoisses, Bleu de Bresses, Délices de Pommard and Gallette affinnée au marc. A cold bottle of St Aubin 1er Cru from Domaine Francois Legros reminded us of our duty to the primary product of the region.

With only the slightest shimmer of reluctance, we are back on the bikes. Happily, for those hazy moments after lunch B&R provides route notes of hypnotic clarity: "500m later, just after pasing a stone arch on your left through Domaine Jacques Prieur you will jog RIGHT and then LEFT through a skewed four-way intersection; 150m after this tricky intersection you should pass a red-and-white triangular sign with 'Risque d'Inondation' in yellow on your right." I do not know that I will ever fully understand the complexities of Burgundy whose taxonomy is as subtle and various as its tastes. Burgundy is where clos yields to climate and monopoles overwhelm domaines; it is a territory where genealogoists have as much insight as gastronomes, but bicycling through vineyards is a better introduction to the realities of the maddeningly complex appellation system than even the best guidebook. You look, for instance, at the tiny vineyard in Vosne-Romanée and reflect that this is the most expensive agricultural land on the planet. Back in town and, somewhat gratefully, off the bike, B&R introduces you to the winemakers.

The aristocratic fief of Burgundy has been under siege from fruit bombs sent by the New World. The winemakers are bruised, but planning a comeback after too much sulphurated Chablis and what Jay McInerney describes as reds tasting like the water in a vase of dead flowers, have damaged a reputation that took 600 years to make.

Gus Dale, an affable Englishman, dressed as a vigneron-bushwacker, at the American-owned Domaine Newman, is determined to make wines with biodynamic legitimacy: he is witheringly articulate about the chemical abuse of the precious terroir, the land which gives flavour and character to the wine. We taste a Cote de Beaune Village '03, a Bonnes Mares Grand Cru of '02 and a Beaune Clos des Avaux of the same year.

London wine merchant John Armit says Burgundy should smell of merde. Happily, this tastes better. At the more commercial Albert Bichot, Philippe de Marcilly takes a different approach. With competition from California and Australia, Burgundy, he says, must abandon the middle market. "Reculer pour mieux avancer?" I suggest. "Non," he replies, rubbing his fingers, "pour mieux gagner."

Burgundian food is in another sort of crisis: like all of French culture, it is trapped by past glories. Much fuss is being made of a restaurant in Pernand-Vergelesses where they serve sushi, but we eat first at the Caves de la Madeleine, run by the personable LoLo. It is a bar stacked with wine and a communal table: we ate terrine de campagne and rognons de veau with an Aloxe-Corton from Domaine Tollot-Beaut. Simple, but excellent: lunch at André Ziltener had reminded us the kiwi has not yet been wholly eradicated. A simple supper at the Bistro Bourguignon was radically bad. At the Caveau des Arches, a 15th-century cellar, we sat in the kitchen to watch a flustered chef deal with a conflagration. We ate more snails and more rognons. In her France - a food and wine guide (1966) Pamela Vandyke Price listed dishes typical of Burgundy: Pouch- ouse (fish stew); Ferchus (pig's bits); oreillon de veau farci (calf's ear stuffed with pike); Gounerre (potato pâté) and rigodon (fruit and walnut custard). All these seem to have disappeared.

But what remains is lavish countryside and marvellous wine. And a bicycle is the best way to enjoy them: exercise and indulgence achieved an exquisite, guilt-free equilibrium. Like all great trips, bicycling in Burgundy made us elegiac - in this case, for a France that has been lost. But take your hybrid into the Côte de Nuits and you can for a few days recapture something very precious. My only criticism? The seat was even more uncomfortable than the Citroën's...

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

GETTING THERE

Eurotunnel (08705 35 35 35; www.eurotunnel.co.uk). Return crossings start at £98 per vehicle.

Brittany Ferries (08703 665 333; www.brittany-ferries.co.uk). Crossings between Portsmouth and St Malo, Cherbourg and Caen start at around £210 return.

Sea France (08705 711 711; www.seafrance.com). Crossings between Dover and Calais start from around £50 return.

P&O Ferries (08705 980 333; www.poferries.com). Crossings between Dover and Calais and Portsmouth and Le Havre from £90.

Butterfield and Robinson (00 33 3 8025 0404; www.butterfield.com), 5 rue de Citeaux, Beaune. Six-day Burgundy cycling tours start at around £1,790.

STAYING THERE

Hotel Le Cep (00 33 3 8022 3548; www.hotel-cep-beaune.com), Beaune. Doubles from €162 (£116).

EATING & DRINKING THERE

In Beaune: Alain Hess (00 33 380 24 73 51), 7 Place Carnot.

Caves Madeleine (00 33 3 8022 93 30), 8 rue Faubourg Madeleine.

Le Bistro Bourguignon (00 33 3 80 22 23 24), 8 rue Monge.

Caveau des Arches (00 33 3 80 22 10 37; www.caveau-des-arches.com), 10 Boulevard Perpreuil.

Chateau Andre Ziltener (00 33 3 80 62 41 62; www.chateau-ziltener.com), Chambolle-Musigny.

VISITING THERE

Hotel Dieu (00 33 3 80 24 45 00), rue de l'Hotel Dieu, Beaune. Admission is €5.50 (£4).

FURTHER INFORMATION

Burgundy Tourism (00 33 3 80 28 02 80; www.burgundy-tourism.com)

French tourism office (09068 244 123, calls charged at 60p per minute; www.franceguide.com).