Living the Exclusive Chateau Life at Domaine de la Tortiniere

It’s been a few weeks since we left you at the train station in Champagne-Ardenne before the next leg of our journey through France. The good news is the train finally showed up, we got on, and headed back towards Paris…where it promptly turned around! What?! Panic ensues. Is my French THAT bad (yes)? A quick Google mapping told me all was well (my sense of direction is just too good): we did turn around but were making a loop, so we were still heading in the right direction and ended up at the Saint Pierre de Corps TGV station in Tours. Whew. Time to find this chateau!

It got a little wild once we got off the train. You may recall that our train was over an hour late, which meant by the time we arrived in Tours the car rental company was locked up tight. Crap. We were about to order an Uber and just deal with the car in the morning (read: tired and hungry) when Jason spotted a tiny note on the door. (Jason says: Yes, tiny. As in, almost the size of a Post-It note. Okay fine, maybe it was a bit bigger, but honestly: this must happen often enough for them to put up a sign, so why not make it a sign we can actually *bleeping* see?!) It said something along the lines of, “if it’s after hours, go to the Kyriad Hotel to pick up your keys.” What? Again! Yes! Also, our thanks to Google Translate. #lifesaver

Sure enough, our keys were waiting for us at the hotel across the square. They handed them off with no additional anything beyond an ID, we found the car, and were on our way! This picking up cars at a hotel is working out great for us. This time, with Hertz.

The drive to the hotel was only about 20 minutes out of town and into the countryside. We arrived at Domaine de la Terraine, our chateau home for the next four nights. Yes, that’s right: our chateau; it’s okay to be jealous. It was gorgeous! We declined help with our bags (does anyone else feel bad about having someone else try to move your ridiculously heavy bag?) and rolled along to our flat in the old carriage house (did I take a photo?…no…dummy). It was HUGE! The receptionist was strangely apologetic about not reserving us a room in the chateau, but this was golden. We had room to spread out, get organized, and for the only portion of our stay in France, not constantly bump into each other. It was heaven.

We wandered back to the chateau shortly after for our dinner reservation, which they told us we could fudge a little, so we had drinks on the terrace first. Gorgeous view. This became a nightly routine. Is this really our life?! However, this was the only night we dined in at the hotel restaurant. I can’t recall exactly what we ordered but it was probably salmon for me and beef for Jason (he also says he had fois gras). All I remember is the giant cart of cheese they were rolling around for dessert (Jason says: yassssssssssssssss!). My cheese-loving husband was delighted for a chance to try all kinds of French cheeses while his dairy-allergic wife went for the fruit dessert. It was going on midnight by the time we finished and strolled back to our room for the night.

The next morning, we were up early for breakfast. (Jason clarifies: “early”) You had to be done eating by 9:45 here, which…is early for me, especially on vacation. We wandered back down to the restaurant (weren’t we just here a couple hours ago? [Jasons says: yassssssssssssssssssss]) and were pleasantly surprised by the amount of bread, fruit, and proteins to choose from. I may have had lemon bread, salmon, and a giant bowl of raspberries and strawberries every morning. Both coffee and tea flowed aplenty, and we were ready for the day once Jason had his fill of bread and cold cuts (#wheninEurope).

Our first full day in the area we decided to venture just 20 minutes away to the village of Villandry to tour the chateau and gardens there. It was quite busy, and hot for the first time on this trip! We immediately went for the chateau tour when we got there, hoping it would be a bit cooler.

The Loire Valley is known for the outrageous number of country chateaus that were once summer homes to Kings and courtiers. The chateaus are enormous (Jason wonders: it’s almost as if they were compensating for something…), the gardens are breathtaking, and the restoration and upkeep budgets must be in the billions every year. You could spend months here and never see them all.

We chose one of the closest chateaus to our little chateau hotel because of its extensive gardens. Chateau Villandry’s restored Renaissance chateau was a marvel, but the gardens. Wow! The entire estate is surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens that are maintained by the digging and hoeing of ONLY 10 gardeners. No chemicals are used, and biodiversity is flourishing, which means they’ve introduced different bugs for pest control, let them do what they need to do, and the gardens are home to over 100 different species of birds enjoying those bugs as well. It’s amazing. Everything is watered by an underground system and looks so effortless. I was blown away. We try hard to implement this at home, but I can tell you by the time the end of August rolls around every year, the bugs are huge, it’s been too hot for too long, and I’m over it. At this point, we call the garden done and wait until the first freeze kills off the bugs before we clean it up for the following year. So hats off to these guys – it’s hard work!

After a quick run through the gift shop, we decided to get sandwiches at the café, stop at the grocery store for a few things on the way back, and then bring it all back to the hotel for a champagne lunch on the lawn (one of our bottles of Champagne Gardet didn’t make it home). Pretty perfect. Hey, it’s a rough life sometimes, but someone has to do stuff like this, right?

After lunch, we decided on a short hike through the hotel’s wooded grounds. We had heard a tale of a boat you could take out on the river, so we went in search of it, but came up empty-handed, only to see it from the terrace later that evening. We never did get a chance to take it out on the water, but I’m sure it would have been lovely.

Since we hadn’t booked another night at the restaurant, we decided on bar snacks for dinner, which turned out to be huge! We ordered a quiche and a salad to be delivered to our room later and were very surprised by the size. It was not snack-sized and more than we needed at that moment, but easily plenty for dinner as an alternative to the restaurant, especially when everything always comes with a basket of fresh baked bread. Yum.

Our much earlier, low-key dinner allowed us time to get some laundry done that evening. We had a huge towel-warming rack in our bathroom plus two other areas to hang things, so we decided to take advantage of it and wash some of our larger items. Since we had both packed checked bags on this trip, there was really no reason we needed to do laundry, but we were so used to washing and re-wearing on previous trips that we did it this time too and ended up not wearing half of what we packed! Lesson learned! I feel like we talked about this somewhere else, long ago. Apparently it’s not sinking in.

The next morning after breakfast we decided it was time to check out a winery in the Loire Valley. Jason had found a small, local, organic winery the previous evening, so we set out to find it. After a 40-minute drive through the beautiful countryside, we pulled into Chateau Minière. It is a gorgeous old 15th-century estate completely surrounded by vines anywhere from 3 to 100 years old! This former fortified farm has been managed by women since the 18^th century. It is currently owned by Kathleen Van den Berghe, who has decided to live off-site and rents the beautiful chateau and its apartments for guests! What a dream!

The vineyards have been completely organic since 2010 but are currently in the process of transitioning to biodynamic (zero chemicals). The introduction of bees and natural flora and fauna in the chateau’s parkland has earned the League for the Protection of Birds refuge status. It is difficult to create biodiversity in a mono-crop environment, and I can see many efforts being put forth to achieve it.

But enough of that, how was the wine? I honestly can’t remember how many wines we tasted (Jason says: 9), but I can tell you that each one was a unique ride. They were all very different! We grabbed three to bring home: a red that I think will be wonderful with venison (must smuggle this one to Scotland), a white that will be great with seafood, and a bubbly that I can’t wait to break out with some dark chocolate or tart berries.

After our outdoor wine tasting under the trees, we got a private tour of the vineyards and grounds after our wine tasting where we asked all sorts of nerdy farm questions. I always try to stump our tour guides, but she was very good. The gal we toured with had only been there since July, but she knew her wine!

Afterward, we headed back to the hotel for another lunch on the lawn after a quick stop at the health food store. I like this routine. There wasn’t really a plan for the rest of the day, so it included a nap, another walk, and an aperitif on the terrace. We skipped dinner in favor of an early night. Neither of us had been sleeping well, so we decided to try our jetlag remedy – Sleepsana – so we needed a full 8 hours.

On our last day, we had a quick breakfast and then sat on the terrace for quite a while drinking tea and coffee. There wasn’t a plan for this day. After a week on the road, we needed to get a little work done, and we thought maybe we would try out the hotel’s pool later. But then it decided to rain and there were a LOT of kids around, so it was rather noisy. It was Friday, so many French families had escaped to the countryside for the weekend.

Somewhere in the middle of our caffeine (which we had moved to the table outside our room), I got a notification saying our train for the next day was eliminated, then rerouted (we needed to go to another station to get on), and then our second leg was canceled altogether thanks to the strikes going on. The SNCF website was very unhelpful as far as trying to figure out how to reschedule all of this, so we decided to skip the train, get a reimbursement, and keep the car an extra day. Our confirmation number for Hertz wasn’t working to extend our rental (ugh), so we ended up venturing into town to see what could be done.

In the end, Hertz was happy to extend our rental, but we had to trade cars. As it turns out, at least in France, the rental locations usually have two different types of cars: some the location owns (like the hybrid Renault SUV we’d rented) and others the rental company owns (like the DS crossover they traded us). Naturally, they wanted to keep the cars they own close to home, and so needed to swap cars with us – so we had a company-owned car – for our trip up to Versailles in the morning.

Our final night at the chateau looked very similar to the rest. We were rained out on the terrace, so we had our aperitifs inside the beautiful chateau and ordered snacks for dinner again, eating in our room when the rain continued and we couldn’t sit at our table outside the room. We went to bed not having packed a thing because our timetable was suddenly much looser the following day since we were driving ourselves to Versailles. One more yummy breakfast in the morning, a small walk in the woods, and then we finally admitted we needed to pack, check out, and be on our way.

We truly enjoyed the slow pace of Domaine de la Tortiniere and Loisium Champagne (which we told you about a couple of weeks ago). When traveling, we highly recommend getting outside of the cities. It’s easier to meet locals, it’s beautiful, peaceful, and there’s just so much to see! Our trip is about to kick up the pace a couple of notches: we’re leaving the peaceful countryside and heading into the city. We’ll tell you about Versailles in three weeks, and finally, Paris after that. Stay tuned!