Rougemont is one of many tiny medieval villages along the roads that wind through the fields of the Alsace Lorraine. The architecture is different – half timber and stucco, and the stony mountainsides of Italy and southern France give way to rolling hills with cottony clouds floating in a sky that seems eternal. These towns seem uninhabited. Each has a church and a “Hotel de Ville”, which means city or town hall. Our interest in Rougemont has to do with a hint in my genealogy on dad’s side, the Willemains. My cousin Janet got a photo of the Villemain Hotel in Rougemont from cousin Ruth of dad’s generation who did a genealogy. We cousins had always heard that we were from the Alsace, but not sure if it was Colmar, Strasberg or wherever on the French/German border.
Rougemont was deserted. It looks ancient, with a fortress looking down from a high cliff and a few buildings around a center. It was Sunday, so no police station or town hall were open. John and I walked around looking for the building façade, to no avail. We noticed a small restaurant that looked open, so we went in, and found many sets of eyes on us. It was a disheveled place with no matching dishes and the proprietor who was also disheveled, and she rambled at us in a dialect that I did not remotely comprehend. She seated us near a couple that were using their teeth to remove small amounts of flesh from a pile of fried frog’s legs. When we asked for a menu, she said, “vous voulez le coq”. OK, male chicken it is. Meanwhile, the stares continued. I got the courage to show the picture of the family hotel around the room while we waited for lunch. No one understood my textbook Parisian French. It became clear that no Americans ever came here, and that these folks thought we were somehow important, with a named building and the words Chateau de Rougemont on top of the postcard photo. The chicken was in a heavy cream sauce and was served with these odd sort of scooped out french fries. It was a delicious heart attack.
In the end we never found out a thing, but the frog legs couple insisted that we stop at their house up the road to meet their dog, and they also presented us with three bottles of homemade wine. Rougemont – no regrets.
d a church that was austere and interestingly as one entered there were several sets of stairs and landings to arrive at the nave because it was built into the side of a hill. The church was empty and frigid even though the air and sun were warm with the early spring blossoming in the village square in front of it. There were beautiful vistas as we looked out onto the vineyards in the valley below, but no wine so on to Pommard.
We arrived in Pommard around 1 and luck smiled on us again; we happened on the only open tasting room, Armand Heitz. We entered and asked for a tasting and the host said he had a tasting scheduled shortly but it would be conducted in French and there was to be no English language tasting on this day. Of course, Heidi stepped forward and assured him in her skillful French that language was no impediment for us (I remained silent having no facility in this language).
The tasting was conducted in a minimally but stylishly renovated medieval room with two other French couples, one young and one our age who arrived on bicycles as a part of a planned countryside tour. We were clearly regarded as outsiders, but as the tasting progressed Heidi worked her charm and by the end we developed a camaraderie.
The wines were wonderful and the vintner, Armand Heitz produced many of the wines without sulfites. Armand is a young man with an integrated business, wine, cheese, meat, and a restaurant. He appears a bit eccentric and maybe the photo below will provide a visual ratification of this opinion. Were purchased half cases of Chassagne Montrachet, a young unoaked red, and one bottle of fine barrel aged Pommard, and 4 crémant. We now had a well-stocked trunk wine cellar to tide us through Germany and Denmark and until our return to France on April 23rd.
