Burgundy

Drain to the dregs Burgundy's full-bodied vistas: rolling hillsides carpeted in emerald green, each pasture crosshatched with hedgerows, patterned with cows, quilted with vineyards. Behind a massive quarried-stone wall, a château looms, seemingly untouched by time; the only signs of human habitation are the featherbeds airing from casement windows and a flock of sheep mowing the grounds. In the villages tightly clustered houses—with roofs of slate from the days when they protected against brigands—circle the local church, its spire a lightning rod for the faithful. On a hilltop high over the patchwork of green rises a patrician edifice of white rock, a Romanesque church whose austerity and architectural purity hark back to the early Roman temples on which it was modeled. And deep inside a musty cave or perhaps a wine cellar redolent of cork and soured grapes, a row of glasses gleams like a treasured necklace, their garnet contents waiting to be swirled, sniffed, and savored.

Although you may often fall under the influence of extraordinary wine during a sojourn in Burgundy—in French, Bourgogne—the beauty surrounding you will be no boozy illusion. Passed over by revolutions, both political and industrial, left unscarred by world wars, and relatively inaccessible thanks to necessarily circuitous country roads, the region still reflects the pastoral prosperity it enjoyed under the Capetian dukes and kings.

Those were the glory days—when self-sufficient Burgundy held its own against the creeping spread of France and the mighty Holy Roman Empire—a period characterized by the expanding role of the dukes of Bourgogne. Consider the Capetians, history-book celebrities all: there was Philippe le Hardi (the Bold), with his power-brokered marriage to Marguerite of Flanders. There was Jean sans Peur (the Fearless), who murdered Louis d'Orléans in a cloak-and-dagger affair in 1407 and was in turn murdered, in 1419, on a dark bridge while negotiating a secret treaty with the future Charles VII. There was Philippe le Bon (the Good), who threw in with the English against Joan of Arc, and then Charles le Téméraire, whose temerity stretched the boundaries of Burgundy—already bulging with Flanders, Luxembourg, and Picardy—to include most of Holland, Lorraine, Alsace, and even parts of French-speaking Switzerland. He met his match in 1477 at the Battle of Nancy, where he and his boldness were permanently parted. Nonetheless, you can still see Burgundian candy-tile roofs in Fribourg, Switzerland, his easternmost conquest.

Yet the Capetians in their acquisitions couldn't hold a candle to the "light of the world": the great Abbaye de Cluny, founded in 910, grew to such overweening ecclesiastical power that it dominated the European Church on a papal scale for some four centuries. It was Urban II himself who dubbed it "la Lumière du Monde." And like the Italian popes, Cluny, too, indulged a weakness for worldly luxury and knowledge, both sacred and profane. In nearby Clairvaux, St-Bernard himself vented his outrage, chiding the monks who, although sworn to chastity and poverty, kept mistresses, teams of horses, and a library of unfathomable depth that codified classical and Eastern lore for all posterity—that is, until it was destroyed in the Wars of Religion, its wisdom lost for all time. The abbey itself met a similar fate, its wealth of quarry stone ransacked after the French Revolution.

Neighboring abbeys, perhaps less glorious than Cluny but with more humility than hubris, fared better. The stark geometry of the Cistercian abbeys—Clairvaux, Cîteaux—stand in silent rebuke to Cluny's excess. The basilicas at Autun, Vézelay, and Paray le Monial remain today in all their noble simplicity, yet manifest some of the finest Romanesque sculpture ever created; the tympanum at Autun rejects all time frames in its visionary daring.

It's almost unfair to the rest of France that all this history, all this art, all this natural beauty comes with delicious refreshments. As if to live up to the extraordinary quality of its Chablis, its Chassagne-Montrachet, its Nuits-St-Georges, its Gevrey-Chambertin, Burgundy flaunts some of the best good, plain food in the world. Two poached eggs in savory wine sauce, a slab of ham in aspic, a dish of beef stew, a half-dozen earthy snails—no frills needed—just the pleasure of discovering that such homely material could resonate on the tongue, and harmonize so brilliantly with the local wine. This is simplicity raised to Gallic heights, embellished by the poetry of one perfect glass of pinot noir paired with a licensed and diploma'd poulet de Bresse (Bresse chicken), sputtering in unvarnished perfection on your white-china plate. Thus you may find that food and drink entries take up as much space in your travel diary as the sights you see. And that's as it should be in such well-rounded, full-bodied terrain.

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