Top Travel Days of 2025, Biking to Santenay in Burgundy
When I ran into Andy Levine, owner of DuVine Cycling, after a Grateful Dead show at the Sphere in Las Vegas, I told him I’d love to go on another Duvine trip, but not sure where. 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
On our first full day of biking in Burgundy this past August, we departed from the former 12th-century abbey, Abbaye de la Bussiere which is now a Relais and Chateaux hotel replete with a small pond, rose garden, ponies walking the grounds, and monastery turned restaurant where we had a gluttonous 5-course feast the night prior. Soon we were on a slow climb, cresting a hill that at the top opened to a vast vista of meadows dotted with dairy cows and horses. Then we were sweeping downhill on a run through small villages and its requisite stone farmhouse, thickets of forest, and glorious fields of sunflowers, several weeks past its prime. As the backcountry road leveled off, we got our first sight of the legendary Grand Cru Burgundy vineyards. The last part of the ride was on a bike trail next to a canal where we followed the flight of herons and the occasional barge going through the locks. All and all, it was a 45-mile ride with some 3800 feet of elevation gain, worthy of a refreshing swim in a nearby river.
Our ride two days later from the heart of Burgundy, Beaune, was another gem and arguably my favorite day. We biked through the nearby vineyards and ascended the Cote 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. We were biking through the white burgundy region, places like Meursault, where pickers already started to harvest the grapes. 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 the best meal of the trip, a restaurant called Le Terroir in the town of Santenay.
My typical lunch is a slice of turkey breast on one slice of Dave’s Killer Bread. Here we started with escargot, where I dipped the heavenly bread into the hot butter. That was followed with fois gras and the best coq au vin I’ve ever tasted, all washed down with exceptional white and red wine. Then we went outside in the hot sun to bike back to Beaune. If I was riding my regular Trek bike back at home, I would have found the next ten miles to be a challenge. But since I was riding a spanking new Specialized E-bike, I simply turned on the Sport button and zipped back to my home for the night, the lovely Cedre Hotel in Beaune. I actually fell in love with the E-bike on this trip, biking on the lowest speed, Eco, for most of my rides to give me a great workout over the week. Then boosting to Sport after our wine-soaked lunches when I needed the extra push. That’s a vacation!
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