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Saturday 22 November 2008

Armchair Traveller

The champagne of villages

Simon Heffer finds a perfect little treat in Ambonnay

Obsessive autorouters will know one thing: that to drive back from Provence to the Tunnel in one haul is ridiculous on several counts. First, there are the counts of exhaustion and boredom. Second, you drive past too many very interesting parts of France for comfort, and good sense and curiosity ought to dictate that you try to see at least one of them. But it has always been tricky to find the right place to stop. Stop too soon — somewhere like Beaune or Dijon — and you are faced with an enormous drive the next morning, quite possibly with a hangover. Stop too late — the Pas de Calais, perhaps taking in some war cemeteries before striking for home — and you are shattered long before you get there. A few years ago we thought we had found the ideal place — Troyes, just before Burgundy turns into Champagne, with its fine cuisine and mediaeval centre: it just seemed to have nothing but charmless hotels and an incomprehensible one-way system, and we had apparently timed our visit to coincide with a complete refurbishment of the city’s infrastructure, which had turned it almost entirely into a building site.

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