Opening La Cave du Centre
A photo essay to document the opening of my little cave-à-manger in Chagny, just south of Beaune.
I opened a wine shop and wine bar (known in French as a cave-à-manger, literally “a wine shop to eat in”) fifteen minutes’ south of Beaune in the Saône-et-Loire town of Chagny early this month. I found the space back in August. I’d been looking for a site for such a project semi-actively since about March.
The point is not to make a career change1, or to write less. It’s to have a space that serves as an office, a showroom, and a place to host friends, while also being, you know, a fun natural wine shop that serves the community in some way. Burgundy has quite enough places to purchase expensive Chambolle-Musigny and foie gras and so on. I thought the best way to serve the community would be to offer the wines from my vigneron friends throughout France and Europe, along with a simple plat du jour and quality bar snacks, all day long without taking reservations. There aren’t enough places in Burgundy for that.
The idea is to be the kind of place I always pine for when I am visiting a wine region. Often I have four tasting appointments scheduled and absolutely do not have the time to have a leisurely French lunch somewhere. Often I have thirty minutes to eat something, anything in the dead hours of the mid-afternoon. I pine for a Spanish tortilla, or anything rapid and hearty and filling involving eggs. Now there’s a place in Chagny for that.
I’ll write more about the Chagny and the northern edge of the Côte Chalonnaise in the coming weeks. In the meantime, by way of explaining my relative lack of journalistic output these past few months, here’s a little photo essay about the opening of La Cave du Centre.