While I was waiting to take my dog to the vet last week, I tried to distract myself by writing about her adventures as a puppy. You can read the story of how Kleos came into our lives on the Substack image below but our trip to the Jura in 2017 combines both wine and puppy so I decided to publish that story here. Read on!
It’s June 2017. Looking back, I have no idea how we were able to find the time but Alessandro, Kleos and I drove off for a long weekend in the Jura.
The night before we leave, our bags are packed and loaded in the car. Just then, we realise that Kleos (who is then just an 8-month-old puppy) has gone into heat. There’s not much else we can do at that point, too late to make alternative arrangements, so we’ll go anyway.
Friday: Geneva. We stopped off to see the Jet d’Eau and maybe this is an inevitable error commited by all naive tourists because when a gust of wind suddenly came from the opposite direction, we got soaked!
By the time we’d dried off, we were running late for our lunch reservation at Le Bistrot du Lion d’Or in Carouge, which was being run by Stéphane Raynaud (who’d been my boss for a year in Paris and for whom tardiness was a cardinal sin…) but after a delicious lunch and some local wine, we continued on…
That evening, upon arriving in the Sud Revermont of the Jura, we visited Géraud at Domaine des Marnes Blanches… and I wrote about that -> here.
We were staying at Domaine Labet, courtesy of Julien and Charline, in a bedroom just down the corridor from the office. Things may have changed but back then, in their village of Rotalier, all the local dogs were allowed to roam loose. Not exactly great news if you arrive with a puppy in heat!
The next day, Saturday, we went to visit to Domaine de La Pinte where we spent a bit too long talking, tasting and walking through the cellar… and we got flashed by a speed camera as we dashed to Arbois for lunch at Domaine de la Tournelle‘s beautiful river-side guingette. We stopped off in Poligny on the way back, at the fromagerie-cave Essencia to buy my body weight in Comté and at Valentin Morel‘s winery for some supplies to take back home.
(Anyway, I’m getting to the point of this story now.)
That afternoon/evening, Julien took us to visit the vineyards (would you believe I didn’t take a single photo?!) and then we were to go and taste in the cellar before dinner at their house.
As we were walking from the house to the cellar, we passed what I swear was the only garden with a fence around it. The puppy was slightly ahead, Alessandro, Julien and I talking… suddenly we hear a whack. And another one. *whack.* A third whack and the fence has been knocked down and out runs one of the largest dogs I’ve ever set eyes on!
Off runs our puppy, chased by this large (clearly male) dog. In quick succession is a smaller dog who’s quite evidently making the most of this new-found freedom because he or she is just bounding in circles… and just afterwards is the owner of these two dogs, one of those impossibly caricatural French men, middle-aged, with a small pot belly, wearing a white vest, and who is never in a million years going to catch up with the dogs. I look at Alessandro and say “I think we may have to come back here in the dog equivalent of 9 months and say “you’re the father.””
Anyway, the puppy came back and found us tasting in the cellar – which incidentally put me in good stead when Mees gave us their Les Champs Rouges 2014 in a blind taste during the MAD debate at Noma in 2023 – and she was rewarded with the bone of the côte de boeuf that Julien cooked for us in their garden at midnight.
The cherry on top of this short visit to the Jura (and now that I think about it, we haven’t been back since!) is that on Sunday morning as we started the drive back to Italy, we stopped off at a small waterfall called the Cascade de l’Ours. It was green, cool, and a nice way to break up the journey.
At a certain point, we let Kleos explore freely. There was pretty much no one else around. Then, I notice that Alessandro is not holding the lead anymore. “Where did you put it?” I ask. “Over there on a log,” he replies. We retrace our steps, nope. We look over the photos (“Ok, so here you were still holding it; here you’re not…”) Long story short: the lead has vanished! Disappeared into thin air. Why anyone would steal a lead, I do not know, but the only other alternative explanation is that the bear whom the waterfall is named after decided to take it himself and that’s even less plausible! Anyway, we made it back home safe and sound, and fortunately, no litter of puppies!
More like this…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Leave a comment