A Visit to Clos Rougeard, 2023
I inched the Winedoctor-mobile forwards, through the gateway and into the courtyard at Clos Rougeard. My hesitation did not reflect any sense of trepidation at what welcome I would receive, or the wines I might taste once inside. It was more the fact that the courtyard bore no resemblance to a working winery, and an undeniable resemblance to a building site. A fully-working, authorised-persons-only, hard-hats-are-mandatory, building site. Should I really be driving here at all, I asked myself.
Creeping forwards in the Honda HR-V – wisely, I had opted for this practical set of wheels over my daily runabout, the Bugatti Vayron (and if you believe this, I have a bridge for sale) – I squeezed between some temporary fencing and a number of artfully positioned traffic cones, before willing the car over an worryingly flimsy sheet of steel which lay across a one-metre-deep services trench. Once over the threshold I dithered; I decided against parking up alongside the bright red Manitou Telehandler, lest I return to find my car buried in rubble, and instead found a spot hidden away behind an outbuilding. An outbuilding which, if memory serves me correctly, hadn’t even stood here last time I visited, back in 2019.
Welcome, I whispered to myself, to the new Clos Rougeard.
