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Nina Caplan
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- Thread Author
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The refreshed barge vessel Marguerite, A Belmond Boat, Burgundy, is the key to a luxurious, food-and-wine-fueled visit to the celebrated wine region.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/TAL-living-room-les-bateaux-belmond-marguerite-BLMNDMARGUERITE0926-fd105fd6711140d9a479a46c7a009190.jpg "The Living Room on Marguerite.Credit: Marco Coppola/Belmond")
The Living Room on Marguerite.
Credit: Marco Coppola/Belmond
Six years ago, with the world in chaos and nothing to look forward to, I received an email from an editor at Travel + Leisure. Might I be free to take a week-long luxury cruise along the Burgundy Canal? I was living in France at the time, and the vessel in question was moored near St. Jean-de-Losne, about an hour away. The Amaryllis, a Belmond barge with four cabins, a dinky swimming pool, and a full-time crew including chef, was waiting for me, the editor said, if I was perhaps interested? I glanced at the blank expanse on my calendar and managed to reply with something slightly more professional than “hell, yeah!”
In the years since that trip, which I wrote about in the February 2021 issue of T+L, the Amaryllis has had a major refresh, including a name change. The barge is now known as Marguerite, and significant alterations have made interiors feel more spacious. The company has also overhauled the look, taking away old-fashioned furniture and floral-motif rugs, and giving the barge some modern elegance, in the form of pale green curved sofas and open shelves, among other contemporary decor elements.
Belmond has also brought in Dominique Crenn, whose San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn holds three Michelin stars, as a menu consultant. Crenn, who was born in France, is clearly having fun with the chance to play with her homeland’s fantastic produce, as I learned when I had the chance recently to return to the Marguerite, on a short late-summer sailing.
The evening I came aboard, Crenn joined our group for dinner, before heading back across the Atlantic. “I’m here to tell a story,” she said, inspecting our starter, which appeared to be a tin of caviar. Except that, beneath a thin top layer of ossetra, was smoked crème fraîche and, below that, an egg bavarois, a kind of custard. Warm buckwheat madeleines, the scallop-shaped French sponge cakes, were served alongside for dunking. Eliott Dubois, the Marguerite’s bartender, offered cocktails, but I stuck with the (almost) local option: Champagne.
That was how the trip started, and—fittingly, for a vessel designed to glide along a manmade waterway punctuated by locks—it never went downhill. We ended up spending most of our time on the Saône River, owing to lower water levels in the canal, but that was fine by me: the backdrop to every evening meal was a broad vista of pink- and orange-tinged water fringed by grassy banks or pale, picturesque villages. It was so alluring I almost had trouble concentrating on my plate, although each dish, accessorized with dabs of puree, sprigs of herbs, or roundels of local vegetables, was prettier than the last.
The bedrooms, one at deck level and three downstairs, mostly below the waterline, were spacious and comfortable, and high beds and generous windows allowed for duck’s-eye views across the river. The bathrooms were also roomy, with powerful rainfall showers. The pool was bath-warm and Dubois stood ready to provide whatever refreshment a guest might desire. There really was very little reason to step ashore, except that this was Burgundy.
So my fellow passengers and I cycled through quiet vineyards on e-bikes and learned to make mustard in a short, entertaining workshop at Edmond Fallot, a moutarderie in Dijon. At the Château du Clos de Vougeot, a 16th-century château surrounded by a vast walled vineyard, where the local Cistercian monks once produced their wine, we were given a lunch of local specialties, including several superb wines, in a stately private room. Later, Christine Drouhin, chatelaine of the small wine estate Domaine Drouhin-Laroze in Gevrey-Chambertin, talked us through her wines while looking out over the vineyards where she grows pinot noir.
We wandered through Dijon and Beaune, both beautiful cities that still bear traces of the immense wealth and power Burgundy once possessed during the Middle Ages. Jonathan Forscini, a senior member of the Belmond team who was our guide for the trip, sprinkled our wanderings with historical anecdotes as judiciously as Neil Churchill, the onboard chef, shaved artichoke on our lobster terrine.
All these tours and activities were flexible. That’s not just because, at this level of luxury travel, the customer is queen but also because barge people are used to being spontaneous. Forscini, in particular, was breezily adaptable: when our group expressed an interest in visiting Dijon’s fine arts museum to see the tombs of Burgundy’s dukes, he made it happen, even though it wasn’t on the itinerary. Another time, when everyone else wanted to buy more mustard and I couldn’t resist the lure of a wine shop, that was fine, too. Any heavy souvenirs were quickly whisked off to the boat; any boring activities were quickly but firmly pruned.
As my days on board trickled away as effortlessly as the water beneath the hull, suddenly it was time to leave. And so, marvelling at how many bottles of Burgundy it’s possible to accumulate in only a few days, I packed my things; bid a regretful goodbye to the kindly, capable crew; and made my way ashore, hoping that I’d be back—and not in another six years.
Marguerite, A Belmond Boat, Burgundy is available as a full-vessel charter, from $100,000 for a six-night journey, accommodating a maximum of eight guests.
The Living Room on Marguerite.
Credit: Marco Coppola/Belmond
Six years ago, with the world in chaos and nothing to look forward to, I received an email from an editor at Travel + Leisure. Might I be free to take a week-long luxury cruise along the Burgundy Canal? I was living in France at the time, and the vessel in question was moored near St. Jean-de-Losne, about an hour away. The Amaryllis, a Belmond barge with four cabins, a dinky swimming pool, and a full-time crew including chef, was waiting for me, the editor said, if I was perhaps interested? I glanced at the blank expanse on my calendar and managed to reply with something slightly more professional than “hell, yeah!”
In the years since that trip, which I wrote about in the February 2021 issue of T+L, the Amaryllis has had a major refresh, including a name change. The barge is now known as Marguerite, and significant alterations have made interiors feel more spacious. The company has also overhauled the look, taking away old-fashioned furniture and floral-motif rugs, and giving the barge some modern elegance, in the form of pale green curved sofas and open shelves, among other contemporary decor elements.
Belmond has also brought in Dominique Crenn, whose San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn holds three Michelin stars, as a menu consultant. Crenn, who was born in France, is clearly having fun with the chance to play with her homeland’s fantastic produce, as I learned when I had the chance recently to return to the Marguerite, on a short late-summer sailing.
The evening I came aboard, Crenn joined our group for dinner, before heading back across the Atlantic. “I’m here to tell a story,” she said, inspecting our starter, which appeared to be a tin of caviar. Except that, beneath a thin top layer of ossetra, was smoked crème fraîche and, below that, an egg bavarois, a kind of custard. Warm buckwheat madeleines, the scallop-shaped French sponge cakes, were served alongside for dunking. Eliott Dubois, the Marguerite’s bartender, offered cocktails, but I stuck with the (almost) local option: Champagne.
That was how the trip started, and—fittingly, for a vessel designed to glide along a manmade waterway punctuated by locks—it never went downhill. We ended up spending most of our time on the Saône River, owing to lower water levels in the canal, but that was fine by me: the backdrop to every evening meal was a broad vista of pink- and orange-tinged water fringed by grassy banks or pale, picturesque villages. It was so alluring I almost had trouble concentrating on my plate, although each dish, accessorized with dabs of puree, sprigs of herbs, or roundels of local vegetables, was prettier than the last.
The bedrooms, one at deck level and three downstairs, mostly below the waterline, were spacious and comfortable, and high beds and generous windows allowed for duck’s-eye views across the river. The bathrooms were also roomy, with powerful rainfall showers. The pool was bath-warm and Dubois stood ready to provide whatever refreshment a guest might desire. There really was very little reason to step ashore, except that this was Burgundy.
So my fellow passengers and I cycled through quiet vineyards on e-bikes and learned to make mustard in a short, entertaining workshop at Edmond Fallot, a moutarderie in Dijon. At the Château du Clos de Vougeot, a 16th-century château surrounded by a vast walled vineyard, where the local Cistercian monks once produced their wine, we were given a lunch of local specialties, including several superb wines, in a stately private room. Later, Christine Drouhin, chatelaine of the small wine estate Domaine Drouhin-Laroze in Gevrey-Chambertin, talked us through her wines while looking out over the vineyards where she grows pinot noir.
We wandered through Dijon and Beaune, both beautiful cities that still bear traces of the immense wealth and power Burgundy once possessed during the Middle Ages. Jonathan Forscini, a senior member of the Belmond team who was our guide for the trip, sprinkled our wanderings with historical anecdotes as judiciously as Neil Churchill, the onboard chef, shaved artichoke on our lobster terrine.
All these tours and activities were flexible. That’s not just because, at this level of luxury travel, the customer is queen but also because barge people are used to being spontaneous. Forscini, in particular, was breezily adaptable: when our group expressed an interest in visiting Dijon’s fine arts museum to see the tombs of Burgundy’s dukes, he made it happen, even though it wasn’t on the itinerary. Another time, when everyone else wanted to buy more mustard and I couldn’t resist the lure of a wine shop, that was fine, too. Any heavy souvenirs were quickly whisked off to the boat; any boring activities were quickly but firmly pruned.
As my days on board trickled away as effortlessly as the water beneath the hull, suddenly it was time to leave. And so, marvelling at how many bottles of Burgundy it’s possible to accumulate in only a few days, I packed my things; bid a regretful goodbye to the kindly, capable crew; and made my way ashore, hoping that I’d be back—and not in another six years.
Marguerite, A Belmond Boat, Burgundy is available as a full-vessel charter, from $100,000 for a six-night journey, accommodating a maximum of eight guests.