Limoux France

This jewel of a city is overshadowed by the famed walled city of Carcassone which lies just a half hour's drive to the north.  However, Limoux has walls of its own.  And, just as Carcassonne has been inhabited for a couple thousand years, so has Limoux.  In fact historians say there has been someone living continually on this spot since Neolithic times.  The western side of the city is nestled up against the lazy curves of the banks of the Aude river.  The Aude gets its start in the Pyrenees, flows past Limoux and Carcassonne and eventually empties into the Mediterranean near Narbonne which is an hour or so away by car.

This village whose population hovers just below the 10,000 mark has the traditional square.

The numerous restaurants serve their patrons seated out in the open space.

Here is a sample of a street in the village.  They are so narrow two cars cannot pass each other.  Any parking is done with the car taking up the space of the narrow sidewalk.

Here is the street where my apartment is located.  The buildings are all of stone, centuries old.

To give you an idea of the age of my dwelling space, here is a ceiling beam which measures about 20 inches deep.

None of the apartments go through from one street to the next.  Think of them in terms of  caves with thick stone walls.  So, I do what the villagers have done centuries before me to stay cool and comfortable on these mid ninety degree days.  I open my sole window early in the morning and let the cool air flow into the apartment. 

After a couple of hours I close it and later draw the curtains and when I go out I close the shutters on the outside to protect it from the late afternoon sun that somehow finds its way to shine down on the narrow street.  I have found that I enjoy living among the 'natives' in this vignette of traditional quiet village life so much that I have extended my stay here twice which is now coming up on a week.

Yesterday evening my hour long aimless meander through the narrow village streets ended in the village square.

My choice was one scoop of framboise (raspberry) and one of passion fruit.  The consistency is close to that of Italian gelato.

This past Sunday about 80 antique dealers set up their booths on the edge of the village.

There were copper pots for Bev.

And lots of art books for Bryna

But after scouring the offerings of all the dealers there was not one antique cork screw.  Drat!!

What lies about half way between Limoux and Carcassone is the reason I am here.  The abbey Saint Hilare built in the 800s is reputed to be the birthplace of sparkling wine in France.  There is a record somewhere dated 1531 that refers to sparkling wine being made by the monks there.

It is interesting to note that abbeys were supposed to be self sufficient which included selling whatever to pay all their expenses.  Alas, Saint Hilaire never could seem to make ends meet.  Once the pope sent a letter to them saying he was reducing the number of monks living there from 26 to 20 to cut expenses. In later years the abbey was shuttered for a time due to cost overruns.

One story goes that Dom Perignon (born in 1638 and died in 1715) stopped by there on the way to a pilgrimage and tasted the bubbly, later went home and down to his abbey cellar in Epernay and re-created the bubbly which has come to be known as champagne.  One can do the math and plainly see that those monks at Saint Hilaire were putting bubbles in the wine a century before Perignon made his appearance on the planet.

Be that as it may, I prefer to believe that the monks at Saint Hilaire did come up with the recipe first and the reason they couldn't make a financial go of the abbey was because they were lying around besotted too much of the time from imbibing their own product. 

We've all seen those depictions of rosy-cheeked  monks in their heavy brown robes wearing a smile that doesn't just quite somehow seem beatific and, well, suggests they might have been imbibing the altar wine.  I just looked over at my collection of empty wine bottles in the corner as I write this blog.  It makes me wonder about shopping for one of those brown woolen robes.

I toured Saint Hilaire.  The site started as the fortified abbey and eventually a small village grew up around it.

I saw where the monks reputedly made their bubbly. It is a cave-like structure dug out of the pebbly earth beneath part of the abbey.  This is what it looks like present day.

I'll have more on tasting the local bubbly and other interesting wines of the area in my next post.

As an aside, the abbey was named after one of the bishops of Carcassone, Saint Hilarius and one of the first written references to Limoux was in the Charter of Charles the Bald, King of France.  I think Monty Python missed a skit opportunity somewhere in there.