Having visited the Cote du Rhone Villages area for two successive spring holidays, I felt that a select group of us ought to step up the grade. The obvious destination for this was Burgundy (there is even some good climbing there, which clinched matters).

An excellent week was had, extensively sampling a carefully selected range of premier cru wines (well, I walked along the aisle with the trolley, grabbing the most expensive wines in the shop). These were all excellent. To go with this, we also found some tremendous local mouldy cheeses. What more could you ask for? Well, climbing I suppose...

We managed some very good climbing, although several days were curtailed by late afternoon thunderstorms. We also lost one day to rain; apart from that, the weather was good for climbing - sunny, but not too hot. The climbing was all bolted sports routes, ranging from steep, technical slabs at Remigny, to long (35m) vertical corners at Cormot. We were doing 5-6 French grades, but there is lots of harder grade stuff available to anyone that wants it. Remigny had a tremendous looking wall, overhanging at about 15 degrees, full of 7b routes — unfortunately, a thunderstorm drove us off before we got onto this wall.