Lunch at Le Montrachet, Wednesday 11th Sept

On Thursday morning, we headed over to Puligny-Montrachet where ACC had an appointment with Madame Joly. Since G and I had visited her domaine as recently as January, we felt it would be too much of an imposition for us to tag along, so we killed an hour wandering round Puligny.

We checked out Le Pelugney (that is the correct spelling!), a new Belgian restaurant which looked quite good, actually. I was particularly interested in their "Crêpes maison flambées au Marc de Bourgogne". Across the square is the Olivier Leflaive restaurant, which had a creepy waxwork-type figure standing outside. I wasn't tempted to take a photo. The menu here didn't appeal and we were particularly disgusted by the offering of a "Duo" of cheeses which seemed unusually stingy for this part of the world - usually you get at least four!

After that, we made friends with an elderly tabby cat sitting on a mat outside its home in a very quiet back lane, which cheered me up immensely - normally we never see cats in Burgundy but on this trip we saw quite a few - and then we walked up to have a look at the vineyards before returning into the village to hit the wine shop.

Here we had a very enjoyable glass of Bourgogne Blanc 2011 from Bzikot while perusing the wine list. They literally went across the road to get it. It was interesting for me to try this, as I've been getting through large quantities of the 2008 vintage from this domaine. G bought a couple of premier crus, and after we left we suddenly thought maybe they hadn't included the two glasses of wine on the bill. It turned out that they had, but they were just three euros each! Not something that would be possible in Angleterre.

It was now time to head over the road to Le Montrachet where a table for lunch awaited us. The sommeliere gave me a wink which was possibly meant to be encouraging, as I was attempting to speak in bad French at the time, or could have been an allusion to the chaos caused on my last visit in May 2009 when I and the other female member of the party had to take matters into our own hands when it came to pouring the wine, and thereby created an international diplomatic incident.

While waiting for ACC to join us, G and I indulged in a kir, and when ACC arrived, he fancied a glass of cremant but it turned out that they don't do a cremant by the glass so he was forced to have champagne. We had the 28.50 euro menu which included lots of amuse-gueles including a little chicken nugget wrapped in filo and deep-fried which was possibly the most delicious thing I ate on the entire trip.

To drink, ACC suggested a bottle of St-Romain 2004 from Domaine Chassorney at 47 euros. I hadn't come across this domaine but he told us it was the real deal - biodynamic, unfiltered and cloudy. The sommeliere clearly approved of this choice. I managed to take a sneaky picture of it. It was like no other burgundy I've ever tasted; if anything, it reminded me of an old, dry Vouvray. Very interesting. We also discovered that "snacke" means in the form of a snake, and that Cafe Liegeois is a sort of coffee ice cream sundae - very nice indeed. The total bill, including a bottle of old friend 1er cru Auxey-Duresses from Roulot, came to 205.50 euros. We spotted that they had left ACC's glass of champagne off the bill and drew this to their attention but they said not to worry about it, which I thought was very decent.

By the time we'd finished, it was about 2.15 and time to head off to our next appointment when all I wanted to do was lie down on a park bench and sleep. Memo to self: next time I go to Le Montrachet, don't schedule anything immediately afterwards. Best lunch of the trip!