France Day 12 – April 12, 2026 – Food and Wine

Today started with a tour of the Paul Bocuse Food Hall in Lyon. It’s definitely an upscale food market – clean, neat, lacking the randomness of many village markets. Many food vendors served their wares in sit down restaurant settings. Yet it’s a popular spot for locals to do their grocery shopping. Prices may be a bit higher, we’re told, but quality and freshness make the prices worthwhile.

Paul Bocuse is a famous Lyon chef, winner of the Legion of Honor and Best Craftsman of France awards. His restaurant maintained a three-star rating for 55 years. He’s been called the “Pope of gastronomy. “

Part of his training was with Eugénie Brazier, a woman chef who trained numerous Michelin-starred chefs in her day. She held six stars, three each in two Lyon restaurants. She was a leader in a movement of women who, when forced out of domestic service at the end of the Belle Époque (1890s), turned to becoming chefs.

He was a pioneer in the nouvelle cuisine movement but also a critic. He is quoted as saying, “Nouvelle Cuisine is nothing on the plate, everything on the bill. “

Our sampling menu included a variety of local sausages, cheeses and pastry accompanied with white and red wine.

After lunch Judy and I set off by bus for a wine tasting at the vineyard of Dominique Guillard, a small operation in Oingt. He and his wife produce about 20,000 bottles per year and sells half of his grapes to others. That’s too small to do export and in fact some bottles are sold only to locals.

Our tour guide says that the French don’t tend to travel abroad as much as others. Instead, they travel locally in search of vineyards that produce wines that pair well with local culinary dishes.

Maybe it’s something in the air, but both of us find the wines we are experiencing here to be smoother and more agreeable than back home, especially the Chardonnays.

After the tasting our bus took us to the medieval town proper. Oingt (hold your nose and make a sound like a baby crying, our guide instructed) is a cute, neat and well-maintained village. Back in the 1980s when people preferred the cities, Oingt was a quiet berg. With the sift of taste to favor rural settings, houses here now approach 800,000 Euros. New home buyers have to settle for places outside the medieval center.

From Oingt, our bus took us on to meet up with the Poetry II and continued on down the river to Tournon.