Arbois: Pasteur's House and the Yellow Wine of the Jura

Required Activities

• In the house Pasteur's family moved into in 1830, when he was eight, and which he later inherited, find the laboratory he built into it and the bench where he worked on the vine — the work that ended in the heat treatment that still carries his name and is applied to half the food in your van

• Taste a vin jaune in a cellar in Arbois and put three things to the test: that the glass is a deep bronze rather than straw, that walnut and toasted bread come up before anything else, and that the bottle it came from is a clavelin and not a standard bottle — then ask to see a barrel still under its veil of yeast, left part-empty for six years and three months and never topped up

• Go into the château Pécauld, the town's wine museum, and stand in the room where the 1774 bottle was uncorked in 1994 — bottles of that same vintage have since gone for 57,000 euros in 2011 and 107,700 in 2018 — then find the château de Verreux, where the growers put together the dossier that won Arbois the first AOC in France in 1936

• Walk the Cuisance upstream from the two-arched 18th-century Pont des Capucins into the reculée des Planches, the blind valley the river rises in, until the cliffs close in on both sides — then climb to the Ermitage at 425 m, about 130 m above the town, and look back down on the vineyards

• Walk the Grande Rue and collect three things: the listed church of Saint-Just, the tour Gloriette left from the town walls, and in the Sarret de Grozon museum, in a 17th-century town house, the paintings by Gustave Courbet — then find the town's emblem carved or painted somewhere on the way, a pelican piercing its own breast to feed its young