Why a Booktrail?
1990s: A husband and wife decide to ditch the day job and emigrate to the Dordogne.
The Ripening Sun
What you need to know before your trail
A dream that many of us might have but few of us have the courage to do it. Not so for Patricia Atkinson and her husband who decided to sell everything and leave everything behind in order to say at least they’d tried. They intended to buy a house in the countryside, covered in vines and find some work to get by.
Sadly nothing went to plan and a serious of events made them consider returning to the UK. Patricia’s husband sadly did due to an illness and the stress. Patricia however soldiered on and this is her story of salvation and struggle as she did everything she could to rescue their life savings and her sanity.
Travel Guide
As the story opens and the dreams start to flourish, Patricia was not a big wine drinker and didn’t have the first idea about how to grow wine or even how it was grown. So for a woman to not only go to France to its famous wine region of the Dordogne and then decide to stay on when her husband had to return home to the UK, was a challenge she nveer thought she’d master.
This woman not only grew her paltry 4 acres into a major estate of 21 hectares but her Clos d’Yvigne wines have now won awards and been adopted by wine merchants all over the world.
This book is not your normal ‘Western couple move to France to live their dream’ but is much more than that. The move, the lack of French, the tragedy to follow them, and her struggles to learn French as well as drive a tractor.
This is a chance to get inside this woman’s head and to see just what it takes to make something like this work. Guts is the answer. And she has plenty of them.
There is so much to winemaking and wine cultivation and it’s fascinating to find that out at the same time as Patricia.
Streetview Maps
Gageac-et-Rouillac castle
Towards the Clos Vineyard
Where Next?
