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French Winophiles Remember D-Day in Normandie
The historic D-Day invasion of Allied Forces into German occupied Normandie occurred on June 6, 1944. This month, our French Winophiles writers are thinking about that event as we highlight food and drink from the region. Julie and I recently spent the weekend in Normandie (French spelling), so my contribution will include some travel tips! Take a look further down in this post for links to my fellow Winophiles’ posts!

Visiting D-Day Sites in Normandy
The map is courtesy of Normandie Tourism, an excellent resource for planning a trip. We booked a small group guide via Get Your Guide, a tour aggregator. The tour company we actually were matched with was Ophorus. Our guide, Matt, had a deep knowledge of the stories of D-Day, matched with real enthusiasm for the subject. He told stories of individual characters from both sides which explained more sides of the events of that time.

Touring the countryside and standing at the landing beaches made the events around D-Day so much more impactful than the movies could ever accomplish. The Germans knew they would eventually face an attack launched from England, so they built the 1000km long Atlantic Wall. This was a series of artillery placements with heavily fortified concrete structures to house troops. The amphibious assault would face the challenges of the landing beaches, Normandie dunes and cliffs, amid artillery fire and machine gun fire by Germans.

The difficulty of the terrain at the beaches is well known, but the countryside presents equal challenges. The marshy lowlands had been flooded by the Germans and there were dense thickets surrounding every pasture making every step difficult with easy defense from the thickets for the Germans. Airborne assaults by paratroopers left thousands of soldiers in deep marshes, often miles away from their intended drop zones. Amid all these challenges, the allies prevailed.

Click on any photo in the galleries below to see the photos in a full size slideshow. Hit ‘escape’ to return to the post.

Charming Normandie: Port-en-Bessin-Huppain
Our lovely gite was hosted by Les Filles du Bord du Mer, with a dozen or so properties in Normandie. Our rental was “L’Esprit du port” in Port-en-Bessin-Huppain. The town is a lovely fishing village with a nice protected harbor. Hotels and restaurants line the port and shoreside of the harbor. The town has a daily seafood fisherman’s market if you feel adventurous enough to cook on your vacation. There are a variety of cafés in town, with a pizza place of all things, very popular with families. The village is located between Omaha and Gold beaches, making our 1st day of exploring on our own that much more convenient.

Le Fruits de Mer et le Cidre ou du Vin
Our gite hosts offered a seafood platter to be delivered on our arrival, complete with wine, local cider, a baguette, and the platter of seafood. This sounded like a perfect antidote to the 6 hour drive we had from Dijon, and it was! There is an incredible variety of seafood available locally in Normandie, our platter included oysters, two sizes of snails, crab, langoustines and crevettes. We wished we would have been with friends as there was easily enough seafood for 4 people! We enjoyed our dinner with a local organic Cidricchus cider and a Famille Lebas Muscadet Sevre et Maine from the Loire valley. Normandie is typically too cold and wet for wine grapes, though there are some growers giving it a shot. As our climate warms, perhaps they will see more widespread success. In any case, the cider was a very nice complement to the seafood, especially if your tastes allow for a bit of sweetness in your beverage. The Muscadet was a different pairing, though equally nice in its bone dry, lean complement to the various bites of seafood.

A Mini-Cut-the-Cheese Lesson
Saturday morning we found the boulangerie and fromagerie in town for the ingredients for lunch. We picked out a couple of local cheeses, Camembert and Pont-L’Eveque. Instead of describing the cheeses, I decided to share a few tips on cheese etiquette in France. Your French hosts would never say anything, but they might quietly sigh in an exasperated way if you cut the cheese inappropriately. First, you must never dig out the inner portion of a rinded cheese! Take a portion, rind and all. If you don’t care for the rind (it’s 100% edible), simply leave it on your plate. Second, when you are cutting, the idea is to give everyone an equal cheese experience. The Camembert is easy, simply cut into the center, then complete your wedge. Don’t hack off a corner of that square Pont L’Évêque, cut straight into the center and complete the wedge going 1/2 way to the corner, or all the way to the corner. Then the next person can take a similar wedge. There are some variations with different cheese shapes, but the principal of giving everyone an equal opportunity stands. Good luck and enjoy!

Fellow Winophiles Share their Normandie Finds
Take a look below for some great ideas related to D-Day and Normandie food and drink. And if you’re planning a trip to D-Dau sites in France, think about Ophurus tours.

• Jeff of FoodWineClick is sharing “A Weekend of Food, Drink and History in Normandie”
• Gwendolyn of Wine Predator serves up “Organic Normandy Cider with Calvados Cream Pork Loin”
• Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm is “Remembering D Day with the Normandy 44 Cocktail”
• Susannah of Avvinare is “Remembering Two Trips to Normandy & Sipping Calvados”
• Camilla of Culinary Cam talks about “When a Norseman Meets a Burgundian in Wine School”

Resources
Here are some resources for touring in Normandy (and elsewhere in France)

• Gites in Normandie – Les Filles du Bord du Mer
• D-Day Guides (and many other regions in France) – Ophorus
• Normandy Tourism Links – loads of information on all types of visits to Normandie