Virginia creeper changing colour

Over the last week or so the change in the colours in Touraine has started to accelerate. Our Virginia creeper has started to turn its customary glorious deep red before the leaves finally tumble to the ground.

Yesterday the latest edition of the Paris-Tours cycle race (La classique des feuilles mortes) was run. Oscar Freire was the winner of the final edition to finish on the famous Avenue de Grammont – one of the mythical sprint finishes as the road is straight for 2700 metres with the finish close to the Hotel de Ville in central Tours. The race was first run in 1896. Although it originally started from Paris it now starts at St-Arnould-en-Yvelines, some 50 km south of the capital. The construction of the new tramway means that it will not be possible to use Grammont in the future.  

A good crowd gathering around 4pm

When I arrived around 1.45pm it was quite quiet and easy to move from stand to stand tasting. Fortuntely the showers mainly stayed away apart from a few insignificant drops of rain. By 3.30pm, however, the alley was starting to fill up and by 5pm had become quite a crush. The weather was good for tasting not too hot or cold.

By 5pm definitely quite a crowd

Tasting makes you hungry – ham on the bone, andouillette etc.  

More postings to follow – Friday night's vertical and my favourite 2009s following today's tasting

Tomorrow sees Paris-Tours, one of the great French classic one-day cycle races, finish for the last time on the Avenue de Grammont – famous for its sprint finishes. Next year the new tramway will rule out racing down one of Tours' mains streets. It is also questionable whether the race should really be called Paris-Tours anymore as it will actually start in Chartres. However, as neither Paris-Nice nor Paris-Roubaix start in Paris either I should let that pass.

More details here.

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Little benefit from cut in TVA in restaurants from 19.6% to 5.5%
Three months after its introduction La Nouvelle République (10.10.09) reports that the restaurant trade is facing increasing criticism over the way the cut has made little or no difference to restaurant prices. Nor is it creating anything like the 40,000 additional restaurant jobs that the cut was supposed to produce according to a critical report from le Cours des comptes.