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Cycling around the Languedoc Vineyards
Cycling around the Languedoc Vineyards
Cycling around the Languedoc Vineyards may be a bit of an exaggeration, more like Cycling around in the Languedoc Vineyards!
Today it was a 50km ride from Cap d’Adge out to Marseillan to the Noilly Prat factory and on through the vineyards of Pinet, famous for its Picpoul de Pinet, then Pomerols, Florensac and the vineyards of Bessan but we didn’t stop for any of the Rosé de Bessan.
We struggled as we left the campsite as we tried to be clever and go through the dunes and Nature Reserve to Marseillan Plage and we soon realised our mistake. Cycling through sand is impossible and even when we were off the sand our hybrid bikes struggled with the deep rutted mud surface with large stones.
But it was only about 1.5m before we were on the main road. In the UK we usually plan to avoid the main roads because of the traffic and inherent dangers of that but here, in this part of the Languedoc, cyclists have the luxury of extensive cycle lanes with a good surface.
There are still dangers though on these cycle paths. Marseillan and Agde, along with their complementary coastal cousins of Marseillan Plage and Cap d’Agde, have an extensive tourist industries and vacation cycling is common around here. The cycle lanes are also often shared with pedestrians. That means that if you’re even a barely competent cyclist your speed is likely to be greater than 15mph (25kph). Yesterday, coming up behind a young mother meandering across the cycle lanes pushing a baby-buggy, a baby on her hip and on her phone pressed to her ear, she was oblivious to us closing quickly and ringing bells to make her aware of us.
The onus is on us for the safety but this, along with headphone-cocooned runners, tottering tourist cyclists and the usual smattering of randomly behaving dogs, can make the cycle lanes quite an obstacle course. It’s not unusual, and quite understandable, to see the more serious lycra on the road where their speeds on this flat terrain are more like 25mph (40kmh)
From Marseillan Plage to Marseillan, it’s a lovely few km along the the cyclepath that tracks the canal then the banks of the Etang de Thau where the smell of the sea fills your senses.
For any lover of the Dry Martini, Marseillan is a must-go destination. They don’t sell Martinis here, but they do make Noilly Prat which is an essential ingredient, albeit only a hint of it the driest of them.
My favourite Dry Martini is a classic recipe of Noilly Prat vermouth with Tanqueray 10 gin, served with a twist of lemon – I’ve never got the whole olive thing.
Their tour is well worth doing and although we didn’t do it in this trip, we just had to take the minor detour passing the front doors.
Marseillan is a pretty little port town typical of this region and we usually drop in once or twice a year.
Our route took us on a pleasant ride through the narrow streets of the old town before we picked up one of the main routes out of town. Like so many provincial roads though the surface was heavily pot-holed and you need to have your eyes down lest you’re unceremoniously ejected over the handlebars.
French drivers take no prisoners with cyclists and will often cut in closer than their British counterparts. They are also very ready with the horn should they consider that you’re 3″ further out from the very edge of the road than you need to be, especially if you’re avoiding pot-holes. You soon become desensitised to the horn though, it’s the wider driver behavioural safety issues though that you need to learn to adapt a more defensive riding style, especially with being more pro-active in taking prime road position when you need to – ahhh, those horns again
We use Map My Ride to plan our routes and then we export a GPX file and email to ourselves, we then import it into Cyclemeter on the iPhones and use that as our route guide; it’s a bit convoluted, but once you have done it a couple of times it’s easy enough and works well.
Cyclemeter integrates well with Strava which we use for the social interaction with other cyclists.
Map My Ride is very good at working out a cycle route, but we have found that it has little awareness of the surface and there have been many times when we have been grateful that we bought hybrid bikes with front suspension. Leaving Marseillan was one of those occasions as our route took us off the Route de Pomerols and onto a dirt track that took us up a long slow climb.
It was only a 100′ (33m) ascent, nothing compared to many of the Cotswold climbs that we have pushed the bikes up, but on deeply-rutted tracks on the upslope it was hard work and at the 10 mile marker point at the top we were both breathless.
From this slightly elevated position we could see across the Étang de Thau to Sete. The Étang de Thau is well know for its oysters that I like so much and Siubhan despises in equal measure.
Probably the most famous wine from this region is now Picpoul de Pinet and you can now see it on almost all supermarket shelves, we even saw it on a winelist of one of Marco Pierre-White’s restaurants for £25; we must have drank gallons of the stuff from one end of the spectrum to the other and I’ve not tasted one worth £25, it’s made from teh same grape as Pinot Grigio. On the supermarket shelves here or at the Cave, €3-5 a bottle is the norm, maybe €15 in some restaurants, and that’s about its true value. We have been drinking it here since 2002 and that is usually from a vat into a carafe at the restaurants for €6-8 a litre (now €10 a litre), so when we first saw it on the shelves of Waitrose at £8 a bottle we were a little amused. We had to buy a bottle, of course, to taste it to see if we were missing something but, nope, it was the same stuff as was in the pichets but not quite tasting as good without the Mediterranean sunshine.
Pinet was our next town and, just like Marseillan, it’s a classic and delightful little French provincial town typical of this area. Now it was about 2pm and, just like every other little French town, it was shut.
Just like Noilly Prat, we did think about a little blat past Cave d’Ormarine, possibly one of the largest producers of Picpoul de Pinet, but we have been to the Cave several times and it’s really only a warehouse outlet to buy Picpoul without anything else there and we were getting peckish.
We checked TripAdvisor to see what cafe options there were in Picpoul and almost all “Near Me Now” options suggested the (slightly) larger town of Florensac about 3 miles away.
It was an easy ride to Florensac with a general downhill trend on a mixture of both tarmac and dirt road, but the surface was good enough, and we were there in 15-20 mins. With most of these small or medium sized towns the roads are usually radial from the centre and, if not, they can usually get us close enough to see a spire that acts as a beacon Centre Ville. Florensac was a bit different and we arrived without really finding a town centre or seeing a church. We did see a large Cave up to the right of us and we headed for that hoping to find a cafe or similar. When we got there is was a well-appointed shop with a full service restaurant. Siubhan thought it a bit fine for what we were after, and how we were dressed, but she asked the chap about it in the shop and he confirmed that it was still open and serving. As it was now 2:30pm we decided to chain up the bikes and go in. All sorted, entered through to the restaurant just to be told by the restaurant staff with a shrug that service has stopped some time ago. [sigh] C’est France!!
Back onto TripAdvisor and the bikes and by using Google Maps we found a route to the true centre of town. Here there were a few restaurants and bars – all now shut! As were the shops, so our standard fallback lunch of a baguette, some cheese and a slug of red wine on a vineyard wall wasn’t an option either. This is nothing to do with it being France, this is our fault because after coming here consistently for 13 years, we know about the post-lunch “dead zone” of rural France and we should have planned better. The only thing open in Florensac was a Tabac and our lunch became a Twix and half a can of Coke each.
The leg from Florensac to Bessan was our favourite. There’s a great country song by Rascal Flatts that says “…kick it in 4 wheel-drive when you run out of road and go-go-go until you hear banjos” and that’s was exactly running through my head as we took to the dirt-tracks again around the vineyards, creeks and backwater shacks. A real joy and privilege to be able to ride like this.
Joining the main road was compensated by tracking the Herault river into town.
Siubhan said that she was surprised that we hadn’t seen more wildlife; I disagreed I had seen a lot of it through the damp swampland, just none of it more than a quarter of an inch long and I had managed to swallow half of it. A near miss with a dragonfly the size of a small budgie was fun though.
Although we had seen a few cyclists pedalling some serious kit, they weren’t many until Bessan when the well tarmaced roads became more common. In the UK, almost every cyclist you come across greets you with a smile and a word of greeting. In France, it’s definitely the exception rather than the rule and our greetings were usually met with a stoney stare or when we got a greeting it was “Hallo” or “Guten Tag”.
Although Picpoul de Pinet is probably the most popular wine from the region to be exported, Rosé de Bessan is almost certainly the wine most drunk within this area. typically sold Vin en Vrac (from the barrel) at about €1.80 a litre into any container you can get your hands on, Cristalline mineral water bottles refilled with the light pink fluid is a very common sight around here and chilled enough, it’s perfectly drinkable giving good value for money.
That said, the Cave at Rosé de Bessan is worth a visit to experience the co-operative and all the other wines there, they’re not all rosé, and some are of good quality and still represent great value for money at €15-20.
The road from Bessan to Agde starts with a few curves alongside the river again, but it then becomes Romanesque in it’s directness.
Only a slight uphill trend, but with tired legs and a headwind we only managed an average of 11.5mph for this 3 mile stretch.
After 13 years of visiting here each summer for about 6-8 weeks a year, Agde is very familiar to us and it was good to see it knowing that we are now on the home stretch. Straight through town and over the slight hill before the downhill part to the Rene Oltra campsite at Cap d’Agde.
On arrival, although we were tired, we were keen to hit the 50km target and the Cyclemeter trip computer was registering 28.5 miles. A quick calculation told us that 50km approximated to 31.1 miles, so we cycled up and down a few rows on the campsite before we could lay claim to this milestone – and not a centimetre more!
