Famed for its vineyards, Beaune sits at the centre of the Burgundy region, and while wine may have been its cultural touchstone, the town had given itself entirely over to tourism. Rather than wine connoisseurs, we found the tourist profile largely to be composed of shambling groups of pale English retirees who — true to the old Noel Coward song that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun — did just that. They shuffled about town in packs, poking into the dozens of tourist knick-knack kiosks and the schlock art galleries and the wine shops selling bottles of Burgundy that only Russian oligarchs could afford. Meanwhile, my wife and I sought shade and — rather than the local full-bodied reds — sipped on bottles of Chablis sweating in ice buckets. It was so blazingly hot we couldn’t walk in the sun for three minutes before becoming light-headed.