TDF2018 Stage 5 Quimper and Stage 6 Brest or Why the French Love Oysters and Muscadet

I have been having time management issues in keeping up with the TDF2018 stages so I am grouping Stage 5 and 6 together. We are still hovering around the Muscadet region of wines though a bit further north. As I noted in Stage 4, we are in a cidre area but most notably when I searched for wines in the region I kept coming up with muscadet and oysters.

Stage 5 Lorient to Quimper, 7/11 204.5km Hilly and Sagan takes the wine and Van Avermaet maintains the yellow jersey.

When you look at the Stage, the sea is just minutes away and lots of seacoast to harvest oysters. No wonder the French love their oysters, they have such an abundance to choose from. Andrew Harper writes about the different types you can find. 

Picture from The Telegraph in an article on trips to Brittany.

For a wine, I have to go with a classic muscadet, biodynamic Domaine de l’Ecu Granite, 100% Melon de Bourgogne. The french have an oyster abundance, no wonder there is a cafe on almost every street corner selling oysters in Paris.

Stage 6 Brest to Mûr-de-Bretagne Guerledán 7/12 181km Hilly and Dan Martin takes the well-deserved win particularly after his gnarly crash last year with 2 fractured vertebrae yet still managed to finish 6th in the overall.

As this Stage started in Brest, I thought it appropriate to salute the patisserie, “The Paris-Brest”.

In salute to bike races, according to wiki “The round pastry, in the form of a wheel, was created in 1910 by Louis Durand, pâtissier of Maisons-Laffitte, at the request of Pierre Giffard, to commemorate the Paris–Brest–Paris bicycle race he had initiated in 1891.^[1] Its circular shape is representative of a wheel. It became popular with riders on the Paris–Brest cycle race, partly because of its energizing high caloric value, and is now found in pâtisseries all over France.”

Stage 6 goes through the Côtes-d’Armor Department which according to FranceToday.com is one of Brittany’s best kept secrets. As we are leaving the Brittany area, Lambig was the wine/spirit of the Stage, not to be confused with lambic, a type of Belgian beer. Lambig is an apple brandy native to Brittany. Distllerie Menhirs

As I am learning at my job at Eataly Chicago, there are a lot of very, local spirits made in Italy and as in this case, in France.

To recap, the full course:

Next up is Stage 7, Fougeres to Chartres and we continue to not be directly in the path of major wine appellations at this point but it is France for pete’s sake, so there is always wine around and you are always near a major wine region by train or car.