When I ran into Andy Levine, owner of DuVine Cycling + Adventure Co., after the Grateful Dead show at the Sphere in Las Vegas last summer, I told him I’d love to go on another DuVine trip. That’s when he sold me on Burgundy, where he first fell in love with the idea of creating a bike company that took you on the best rides in the region and wined and dined you at exemplary local restaurants before spending the night at a top-shelf property not usually known by the masses. For me, Burgundy always felt too much about the wine and not enough about the biking. Wow, was I wrong. Not only was the diversity of terrain enticing, but there was very little car traffic to contend with the entire week of biking. What a joy!
Our ride two days later from Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy, was another gem. We biked through the nearby vineyards and ascended the Côte-d’Or hillside, standing atop a cliff wall that looked down at the villages below. We were soon riding past one of those towns, Orches, which clung to the hillside and was recently named the most charming village in France. Then we were riding through the white Burgundy region, places like Meursault, where pickers already started to harvest the grapes in late August. We stopped for a memorable wine tasting at Domaine Evenstad, (so good that I bought six bottles to be sent home) before biking a little bit further to arguably my favorite meal of the trip, a restaurant called Le Terroir in the town of Santenay.
