Stage 9 Tour de France 2023

Food and Drink to Go with Stage 9 Tour de France 2023

The Auvergne region has produced wine since Roman times, and in the C11th had over 10,000 hectares of vineyards. It is not necessarily one of France's most celebrated wine-producing areas today, though.

Instead if you want to sample a local alcohol, why not try Gentiane? It is made with the root of the gentian plant. Génépi, made in the Alps, uses the plant itself to create a similar liqueur.

Buy a bottle of Gentiane liqueur.

The Auvergne is not renowned as one of the most famous regions of France for food and drink, but it does make some excellent cheeses. Perhaps the best-known are Cantal and Bleu d'Auvergne.

Other local blue cheeses include Rochebaron, Bleu de Chèvre (which is, as you would expect from the name, blue cheese made from goat's milk), Saint Agur, and Fourme d'Ambert.

Puy lentils, lentilles vertes du Puy, have been grown in the region for centuries. Truffade is a thick potato and cheese pancake

Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat

Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat is a town of 5,000 people, east of Limoges.

It gets its name from Saint Léonard, a hermit who may have lived in the area in the 500s, and around whose tomb the town grew. Léonard is the patron saint of prisoners.

The inhabitants of the town are called Miaulétous. This name is said to come from a red kite which nested in the bell tower of the collegiate church of St Léonard: red kites are called milans in French, and miaula in the local Limousin Occitan dialect. Another possibility is that the name comes from the Occitan diminuitive for Leonard, which would be liaunetou; it's common to invert the consonants in the local dialect, which could produce niauletou.

There was a ford here before the Roman conquest, on an important route between Bourges and Bordeaux.

St Léonard appears for the first time in a biography written in the 1000s. According to that book, he began his life at the court of King Clovis at the end of the 400s. He was granted the right to visit prisoners, and to release some of them.

He then left court, and came here to the forest of Pauvain to live as a hermit. He built a chapel, and on his death he was buried there. The chapel became a place of pilgrimmage, and amongst the pilgrims who visited it was Richard the Lionheart. 

The story of St Léonard may not have a sound historical basis, but the town which bears his name grew here, and a bridge was built on the site of the earlier ford of the river. Around the year 1000, a first castle was built. The town became an important stop on the route of the pilgrimmage to Santiago de Compostela. Town walls were constructed in the 1100s.

In the 1500s and 1600s, convents were founded in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, as well as brotherhoods of 'penitents'.

As at Limoges, porcelain was made here. Other traditional trades and industries include making massepains (a type of macaroon), leather-work for shoes, and paper mills.

One of the main sights is the collegiate church of Saint-Léonard, which dates from the 1000s, and is in the Limousin Romanesque style. The pont Noblat, over the river Vienne, dates from the 1200s.

There's a museum dedicated to chemist Gay-Lussac, and a railway museum.

Raymond Poulidor

Raymond Poulidor (15th April 1936 to 13th November 2019) was born into a farming family in the Limousin. He wasn't born in Saint-Léonard, but it was his adopted home.

As a bike rider, he was nicknamed Pou-Pou. He was French national champion in 1961, and he made the podium of the Tour de France on eight occasions, although he never won it. He finished second three times and third five times.

His big rivalry was with Jacques Anquetil. Anquetil was a stronger individual time triallist than Poulidor. Although Poulidor didn't beat Anquetil in the Tour de France, he was more popular with the French public - he had greater Poupoularité.

In later life Poulidor was often to be found on the local mountain bike trails, or doing his shopping in town, and the Miaulétous generally didn't bother him.

Poulidor's daughter Corinne married Adri van der Poel, and their son Mathieu is quite good at cycling.

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Clermont-Ferrand

Clermont-Ferrand is a city of 147,000 people. It is the capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.

It is surrounded by a chain of volcanoes, the Chaîne des Puys, including the Puy de Dôme.

It was known by the ancient Greeks as the capital of the Avernie tribe. In the C1st BC it developed as a Gallo-Roman settlement under the name Augustonemetum. The Roman forum was on Clermont mound, the site of the present-day black lava stone Cathedral.

Clermont suffered Barbarian attacks as the Roman Empire crumbled in the 300s and 400s AD. Later, there were Viking raids in the 800s as Charlemagne's Empire weakened.

Clermont was the starting-point of the First Crusade, in which Christendom sought to free Jerusalem from Muslim domination. Pope Urban II preached the Crusade in 1095 at the Second Council of Clermont.

The 'Ferrand' part of Clermont-Ferrand came out of disputes between the Counts of Auvergne and the Bishops of Clermont. The Counts founded a rival city to Clermont on a mound next to Clermont's walls; they called it Montferrand.

Clermont and Montferrand were joined as one city, Clermont-Ferrand, by edict in 1630.

Clermont-Ferrand is home to tyre company Michelin.

In 2023 Clermont-Ferrand hosts both the men's and the women's Tour de France.

Puy de Dôme

The Puy de Dôme is a lava dome. It is one of the younger volcanoes in the Chaîne des Puys, created by an eruption 10,700 years ago.

There was a Gallo-Roman temple of Mercury on the Puy de Dôme.

In 1648, Florin Périer measured the height of a column of mercury at three elevations on the Puy de Dôme, to help demonstrate the theory behind air pressure and barometers.

In 1875, a physics lab was built at the summit of the volcano, and in 1956 a TV antenna was added.

There are two paths up the Puy de Dôme, and since 2012 there is a rail option: the Panoramique des Dômes rack railway goes most of the way to the summit. The road next to the railway is closed to general traffic.

The first ascent of the Puy de Dôme on a bicycle was by Fernand Ladoux in 1892.

The Puy de Dôme in the Tour de France

Fausto Coppi won on the Puy de Dôme in 1952.

Perhaps the most famous Tour de France ascent of the Puy de Dôme was the 1964 battle between Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor. Poulidor won, but didn't do enough to overtake Anquetil in the General Classification.

Luis Ocana won twice on the Puy de Dôme, in 1971 and 1973.

A well-known episode took place in 1975, when Eddy Merckx was punched in the kidney by a spectator.

In both 1976 and 1978, Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk won on the Puy de Dôme.

Before 2023, the last Tour de France ascent of the Puy de Dôme was in 1988, a stage won by Johnny Weltz. Pedro Delgado was in yellow.