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The Magical Château du Bourg in Perreux.
The Château du Bourg is located 3km away from Roanne, and about 80km from Lyon. Situated in a 500 acre estate it has beautiful views of the 16th century medieval village of Perreux.
Based in a region famous for its gastronomy, the Château du Bourg has a large summer house (it’s original orangery), recently renovated with heating and air-conditioning. This beautiful building, full of ancient character, is ideal for weddings, receptions, or business seminars and events. It can accommodate up to 200 guests.
This magical Château and its stunning countryside location also has a recently restored 17th century house with 3 bedrooms, and 2 suites which can accommodate up to 12 persons for self-catering or special events.
Apart from the magnificent grounds around the chateau where you can relax in the gardens or stroll through the estate, there is also a 120 acre fishing lake where you can fish for pike, carp, and black bass. It is a perfect place for a fishing holiday or just for some holiday fun. Ideal for both family and business events, too.
Close by you can enjoy golf, horse-riding, and swimming, as well as a huge variety of country and water sports, including different types of flying opportunities at Renaison airport nearby.
An absolutely perfect place for a weekend or holiday break.
Discover the Beaujolais near the Roannais!
The Roannais may not be the most well known wine growing area around the world, but our neighboring department certainly is.
The Beaujolais is just 30 minutes drive from Roanne, in fact pre-19th century the Roannais was part of the Beaujolais region.
Here we recently had the opportunity to visit a small, family producer of wonderful red and white wines.
Roger Dumas cultivates a mere 5 hectares of vines and follows generations of his family in growing traditionally and esthetically.
Twice, each year, for a weekend, M. Dumas opens his doors and takes immense pleasure in explaining his methods and ethics to the public.
His is a story of tradition and quality, profit being a bonus when it happens, but certainly not Roger’s priority.
A producer of integrity and humility, who cares for his land with true passion and belief in quality, never willing to sacrifice the latter.
We visited with a good friend, who had joined the group of loyal ‘harvesters’ each year, (in his younger days!) to work hard in the fields, sleep rough in the huge barn and benefit from the fabulous family hospitality each evening. A ‘rites de passage’ for many a young man, (and woman of course!)
The Beaujolais region is notoriously beautiful. Rolling green hillsides dotted with tiny villages, golden in the sunshine.
Though not distracting from this beauty, as in many regions, a change has taken place over recent years. Sadly, you can see where odd fields have been stripped of their vines and turned to more profitable crops, a mark of the decline in France’s dominance of the world wine market, as new countries and big business in particular take over.
Never an option for M. Dumas, who almost takes great delight in describing the 2 years out of the last 10, when due to bad storms in the area, his whole crop was destroyed. Not willing to compromise, and produce an inferior vintage the harvest was abandoned until the following year- c’est la vie!
Back to the visit!
The very humble barn had been opened, and decked with trellis tables.
Along side the open bottles lined up for tasting, were various local delights- huge bowls of cherries from the garden, green olives and oil from a family friend in Spain, who shares M. Dumas’s beliefs in traditional and natural production. There were walnuts and almonds, from the same Spanish farm as well as cured ham, delicious!
The red wines varied in age, each with it’s own distinct character and along with the white, rose and sparkling, offered a variety fit for any occasion.
Also a delight was the locally made goats cheese and honey that was on offer to taste. With their artisan producers, proudly talking about their products, and farms.
We came away, as one does on these occasions, feeling content and at one with the world, happy that in this corner of France, like our own Roannais region, the respect for nature and traditional ways were being upheld against the flow of technology and mass production.
Try our Purefrancenow Gourmet Week-ends with visit to a vineyard in the marvellous Cote Roannais, complete with wine-tasting, and a sumptious ‘Menu Gourmand’ at the amazing Chateau de Champlong in the Roannais.
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Bernard Ceysson Gallery and Claude Viallat, Saint Etienne
Special 3-month exhibition of the amazing contemporary art of Claude Viallat starting this month at the Bernard Ceysson Gallery in Saint Etienne.
CLAUDE VIALLAT – PEINTURES ET OBJETS
September 29, 2011 – January 07, 2012
Claude Viallat (born 1936) is a French contemporary painter.
Born in Nîmes, he grew up in Aubais, a French village with a strong bull tradition. In 1955, he joined the École des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts School) in Montpellier, where he met André-Pierre Arnal, Vincent Bioulès, Daniel Dezeuze, Toni Grand, François Rouan, and Henriette Pous, whom he married in 1962.
After doing his military service in Algeria from 1958 to 1961, he joined the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (the National Fine Arts School) of Paris, where he met fellow students Joël Kermarrec, Pierre Buraglio, and Michel Parmentier. He discovered American art in Paris, notably the works of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Francis, and Mark Rothko. As soon as 1963, he was attracted to abstraction. He was appointed as a teacher in the École des Arts Décoratifs (Decorative Arts School) of Nice in 1964 and decided to create a new formal language questioning the conventions of classical painting. He then started working systematically with one shape affixed on canvas without stretchers. His first personal exhibition took place at Nice’s Galerie A in 1966. He also participated in several collective exhibitions that year.
In 1967, he was appointed as a teacher in the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Limoges, where he met Raoul Hausmann. In 1968, in Paris, Viallat had his first personal exhibition at the gallery led by Jean Fournier – who remained his gallerist for nearly thirty years. He then participated in an exhibition that arguably originated the “Support/Surfaces” movement at the ARC, in the Modern Art Museum of Paris. His works were in most of the exhibitions of the movement from 1969 to 1971. Although he initiated this group and influenced it aesthetically through his pictorial works, he resigned on May 3, 1971 as he disagreed with the political and theoretical orientations imposed by Louis Cane and Marc Devade.
In 1972, during his first trip to the United States, he discovered Jackson Pollock’s paintings and the art of Native Americans. The same year, he participated in the “Amsterdam-Düsseldorf-Paris” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, and the “Douze Ans d’Art Contemporain en France” exhibition (Twelve Years of Contemporary Art in France) at the Grand Palais in Paris.
In 1973, he was appointed as an instructor at the École des Beaux-Arts (the Fine Arts School) of Luminy (located at avenue de Luminy, in Marseille), and moved to Marseille. In 1974, the first ever Viallat exhibition in a museum was organised in Saint-Étienne’s Musée d’Art et d’Industrie (Museum of Art and Industry). In 1979, Claude Viallat became director of the École des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts School) of Nîmes. He started collecting objects related to bulls. His collection was the starting point of the Musée des Cultures Taurines (Museum of Bull Tradition) of Nîmes, opened in 1986.
The Centre National d’Art et de Culture George Pompidou (the National Modern Art Museum of Paris) hosted a Viallat retrospective in 1982. He represented France at the Venice Biennial in 1988. The same year, he made the stained-glass windows of the Gothic Choir in Nevers Cathedral. In 1991, he became a teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National Fine Arts School) of Paris and participated in the Supports/Surfaces historical and retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne (Modern Art Museum) of Saint-Étienne. In 2006, he was awarded with the Fine Arts Academy’s Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca (Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation) prize for painting .
In France he is represented by Bernard Ceysson, galerie Jean Fournier in Paris since 1968, and wiki:fr:Daniel Templon (from 1998), in Montpellier galerie Hélène Trintignan. Claude Viallat is also représented internationally in Tokyo by Gallery Itsutsuji and in New-York by Leo Castelli.
(Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_viallat)
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