For our beginners' biking tour of Burgundy, we used an arranger called Discover France (www.discoverfrance.com), and I recommend them. We booked online and they sent us a lot of information and answered our individual questions via e-mail. The company is American, and they work with a local French firm called Promenades en France. They offer bicycling (and walking) tours of various lengths and levels of difficulty in many parts of France.

In our case, after a few lovely days in Paris, we took a train south, changing at Dijon to reach Beaune, in the heart of the Cote d'Or (golden hillside) at the center of the Burgundy wine country.

Burgundy is famous, of course, for its red wine, or pinot noir as we call it, but also for wonderful Chablis and sparkling wine.

Beaune is a charming town once surrounded by rampart walls and a moat that still separate the old town from the new part. It is worth a day of exploration itself, to see the wine museum, the Hotel Dieu hospital and shops selling more kinds of wine paraphernalia than most of us can imagine — corkscrews that cost up to $200, if that is your passion.

We arrived mid-afternoon and made our way to the Hotel des Remparts, a family-run two-story hostelry that I found "quaint" and my slightly pickier wife found "threadbare." It is a favorite of travel expert Rick Steves, whose many guidebooks include "Europe Through the Back Door." In fact, a Steves tour was in residence when we arrived.

Our bikes were waiting in the hotel courtyard, and that evening, Catherine from the tour company arrived to give us a sheaf of booklets and vouchers for our hotels, meals and tastings, a route book she wrote and illustrated herself and — all-important — that phone number for trouble. She also gave us very detailed topographical maps, which later saved our lives. Then we went to dinner.

The chosen restaurant was good, and they got better over the next nights. The voucher entitles you to a prix fixe dinner with several choices for each course; not the most expensive part of the menu but not the least expensive, either. You pay for your own alcohol and, of course, are free to order and pay for anything else you want. We often added a foie gras appetizer or the like.

The next morning, we were off on our bikes, well-equipped and well-maintained "hybrids," a cross between road and racing bikes. We never had a problem or even a flat, but it is necessary to know how to fix one as there is, as I mentioned, no sag (rescue) wagon.

RIDING VINTNERS' ROADS

We stopped in the Beaune town square to buy our lunch, picnic fixings of baguette sandwiches and a half bottle of wine, and rolled out of town.

Throughout this region, single-lane roads that vintners use to reach their vines have been turned into well-marked bike routes, away from the busy main highway. It was September, harvest season, and up the rising sides of the valley we could see groups of pickers moving down the rows.

They come to the fields in mini-buses rather than ox carts, but this scene is as it has been for hundreds of years. As each picker selects a ripe bunch of grapes, he or she gently eases it into a large cone-shaped backpack. When the cone is full, the picker heads to a waiting mini-truck, climbs a short ladder and bends forward far enough for the grapes to pour in.

The September morning light, the rolling vineyards and the harvest in process made it hard to keep our eyes on the road.

Further down the valley, our route began to rise gradually until we reached a village called St. Romain. Here we found a small but modern cooperage (or tonnellerie) where stacks of oak staves were slowly singed over an open-flame pit until they bent far enough to be made into the barrels for wine. Later, we even saw a school for barrel-making.

From here, the route book said the road would rise steeply for the next few miles, and that was enough for us. Consulting the map, we discovered that by skipping the next town (even though it offered a nice 13th-century castle) we could coast downhill for a while to intersect the loop on the far side of the loop. Given a choice between a serious uphill and down, we did the intelligent thing.

VILLAGES AND A WINERY

We coasted through more villages and stopped for a tasting at one winery. When we reconnected with the suggested route, we were in Meursault, and from there doubled back to Montrachet, both names familiar to even casual drinkers of French wine.

In Montrachet, we found a very pleasant town square where we broke out lunch. Chic cafes lined the square, but we were happy as could be munching our baguettes and sipping wine from plastic glasses. A lovely monument near the square honors the people who still do the back-breaking work that brings fine wine to our tables.

The return to Beaune took us through a more workaday village called Pommard, where a wine-tasting had been arranged for us at the Cave de Pommard.

Here an amiable young woman named Delphine, a graduate of wine school and relative by marriage of the owner, spent an hour and a half coaching us through Burgundy Wines 101, in lovely French-lilted English that one could listen to for hours.

Wine-tastings in France are a bit different than in Napa Valley, or at least one may feel a greater unspoken obligation to buy a bottle or two after a tasting. (Of course, some Napa vineyards now charge admission for tastings.) Even though we were biking, we bought a bottle from the talkative, generous Delphine.

Fortunately, the distance by wine-haul road from Pommard to Beaune was rather short, so when we left the wine-tasting we had a straight course to zigzag back to the hotel. Some people believe in tasting and spitting, but I hate to waste a good sip.

After a short rest, we made our way to dinner and, I admit, a very early night. Even with our shortcut, we had done about 30 miles that first day.

A word about training: We did "train" over the months leading up to the trip, but never as far as we biked that day. I doubt that anyone but a serious bicyclist gets enough training before a trip like this, and we definitely felt we should have done more. Still, it was fun and we both made it, so there.

Next day, we changed hotels, so we left our luggage in the lobby and set out, again after a stop for a picnic lunch, for the transit to Nuits St. Georges, a village to the north.

The route took us by Aloxe Corton, famous for its white wine known as Corton Charlemagne for the King of the Franks from 768 to his death in 814. The story is Charlemagne loved the red wine from the area so much it turned his beard red. His wife ordered that only white grapes be grown here.

In Nuits St. Georges, we stayed at the newer hotel La Gentilhommiere (mansion.) My wife loved the place with its multi-colored roof; to me it was a motel, but a nice motel.

The next day was another loop which we shortened a bit, but it did take us to a magnificent castle called Chateau du Close de Vougeot, where monks first planted vines in the 12th century. Today it is the largest area of grand cru (the highest classification) in Burgundy, but the 150-acre vineyard is shared among 80 owners with an average annual production of just more than 1,000 bottles per year. A wine taster's dream — or nightmare.

Our scheduled wine-tasting in Nuits St. Georges was at Cave du Dufoleur Pere et Fils, a dealership with its own vineyards dating back generations. The elegant and urbane Bernard was our guide here, and he showed great patience as he led us through more mysteries of the local grape.

Both dinners in Nuits St. Georges were exceptional. The first at Bois du Charmois, an award-winning country inn. This was the only place we found with neither a written menu nor anyone who spoke English. As the menu was recited we fastened on a word we understood — "filet" — and loved the steaks but wondered what wonderful things we had missed without a translation.

'SAUCE DE KIKKOMAN'

The second night, we ate at the restaurant in La Gentilhommiere itself, called Le Chef Coq. The chef had worked in Paris and Nice and flirted with Asian fusion. One dish was adorned with "Sauce de Kikkoman." In all, the setting, the meal and the service were all superb.

In all, we loved our tour. One question we asked ourselves was: Could we have done this ourselves, without the tour company?

The answer: Yes and no.

We likely could have found our own hotels and restaurants, maybe doing better than the tour company, but maybe worse. In Beaune, it is possible to rent bicycles directly, for example, from a shop called Bourgogne Randonnees, which offers suggested riding loops very similar to but not exactly like the ones we took. But then, how would we have moved our bags?

In short, while more-experienced travelers (especially with more French than we have) could do it on their own, we probably could not, and, more importantly, would not. There is comfort in having knowledgeable people make the arrangements, and while we never called that phone number because we were in trouble, we knew we could.

"Hello, Catherine, we are lost. Perde. Lost. Catherine?"