Today we went for a morning bike ride because the sun was out after several days that were mainly rain.It was our teenage football playing visitor’s first serious bike ride and John went “easy” on him, only riding along the top of the ridge instead of down into the valley and up. But even so, there are some nasty hills for the uninitiated. So John felt good about being able to outclass the young’un.

At one of the hilltops where we stopped to catch our breath a woman drove by and started to chat with us. She pointed to a lovely house a bit down the hill and said we should go there to taste their wine. So we did. Not a tough sell!

It turns out that Cru Lamouroux actually owns the vines that are in front of our house at Clos Mirabel! The Cru Lamouroux winery is now into its 5th generation of being owned and farmed by the same family. They do not sell through any retail outlets; just directly from the farm.

“The triumph,” says M. Ziemek, whose wife is from the original family, “is not when people buy at a tasting. It is when they come back to buy more!” He will certainly triumph with us then, as we enjoyed all four of the wines we sampled.

We also enjoyed the wide-ranging conversation, covering topics such as the relative importance of the quality of the grapes versus the skill of the winemaker (he thinks the former is the more important, though obviously both are essential), his irritation with Brits who don’t even try to speak French, and the poor quality of second language instruction in both French and Canadian schools.

Another topic was the aging of wines. One of the ones we had today can easily be drunk 50 years from now, he says. The oldest bottle he’s tasted from the family cellars was a 1947. The oldest one they still have is 1918. By this point, although he’s confident it would taste fantastic, nobody is about to open it. Instead it will continue to be passed down from generation to generation.