Our First Real Day in the Neighborhood! Friday, October 5th

Having gone to sleep after midnight and after our long drive from Toulouse back to Broze, we sleep in till the alarm wakes just me – Maxine woke up at 8:30.  We’d done that, our first disciplined wake up of the trip, because it's market day in Gaillac and Suki told us that we should be there by 9:30. 

We get extremely lucky when we arrive in town.  We’d expected a challenge to park (it’s always a challenge to park in France), but we end up finding an easy to pull into spot a ½ block from the town square, which was the center of the market.  There are actually 3 open air markets to inspect.  In the center of the town, clothing and shoes, CD's, silk flowers, and etc.  We see so much clothing we start to wonder about the economics.  Is it cheaper just to buy (at the presumably higher prices) from the stalls than it is to drive to Toulouse or somewhere else with department stores.  But, the things we see aren't visibly "french" and we're not very interesting. 

To the right and downhill one block was the food stalls area.  Roasted chickens, five or six bakeries and at least as many cheese mongers, a coffee roaster, multiple olive vendors, butchers and a fish truck, cooking foods to take away like paella and aligot...  Great stuff.  We buy tapenade, bread, fruit, a tart, a truffle flavored dry sausage, two cheeses, and a bunch of other things that Maxine will remember and I don’t.  We pass on the foie gras (not for cruelty to animal reasons, but more because we want to wander rather than head back home and eat it!)  Back up to the square and to the left were more food stalls as well as merchandise (like CD’s, more clothing, other uninteresting stuff). 

We head home and have a nice salad of lettuce, bread, and otherwise try not to overindulge.  We then wait till the 12-2pm sleep it off hours (for the French!) have passed and head back to Gaillac, which, in case I haven’t mentioned, is 10 minutes away. 

We’re both interested, very interested, in wine tasting in the area.  There are, in fact, vineyards and wineries all around us (literally!).  But, we’re also a bit shy about going to the wineries.  This isn’t like California where there’s a whole business to tasting rooms.  Here, you’re asking some guy to get off his tractor, struggle to speak English with you (or you struggle to speak French), taste some wines w/out really being able to chat about them and otherwise fill the drinking time, and then choose a bottle or more to buy, worrying that you’ve made him feel that he’s wasted his time.  It's also the vendage right now so the farmers are pretty busy.

So, luckily, the town of Gaillac has established a cooperative venture downtown where each week they showcase 20 (or so) wines from the various (100) wineries in the area.  The tasting rooms throughout the region still exist, but for us this is a no fuss way to get started on wine tasting in the area.  And it works just fine.  The woman speaks enough English to match our French, she’s able to describe the wines, and we end up buying a rose and a red.  We tell her we’ll be back next week, and each of the following weeks, when she switches to a new set of wines.

We’ve got our map of the wineries and head towards one that seemed interesting and was on the way back to Broze.  Off a side road, no one is there when we pull up and we see a guy come out of the barn.  I chicken out and wave and drive away…

From there we head to a cooperative, Chateau La Bastide.  A large enterprise with a full time tasting room.  We taste a bunch of wines and buy a rose, a GREAT red, and a sweet wine to go with our not yet purchased foie gras.  It’s a lot easier this way, sort of dipping our toe into the wine tasting thing.

Home for dinner on the terrace -- cheese, pate (bought at Leclerc, not the market in Gaillac), tapenade, salad, apple/Armagnac tarte, wine.  We're happy!

Views from our house: