France | Slow Roads

There is a version of France that has nothing to do with the obvious itinerary, and everything to do with the kind of travel that requires you to slow down enough to actually taste it. This nine-night journey for two couples was built entirely around that proposition: a route south from Reims to the Luberon that moved at the pace of the meals, the markets, and the wine. It began in Champagne, where two nights at Les Crayères — a Belle Époque château set in its own parkland on the edge of Reims, two Michelin stars in the dining room — gave way to a private morning in the cellars of Krug: not a tour, but a conversation, guided by the chef de cave through a library of vintages going back decades, ending with a glass of something extraordinary in a chalk cellar thirty metres below the city. Burgundy followed, with a base at a privately rented domaine in the Côte de Nuits: three days moving between the appellation villages — Gevrey-Chambertin, Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanée — in the company of a vigneron who had grown up on this particular strip of hillside and understood it with the intimacy of someone who had never needed to leave. A cooking afternoon in a farmhouse kitchen outside Beaune, learning to prepare coq au vin the way it has always been made in that house, with the wine that came from the vines visible from the window. The journey ended in Provence: four nights at Airelles Gordes, perched above the Luberon with the kind of view that makes every other view feel provisional. Markets in Apt, a private visit to a perfumier's garden outside Grasse, a long lunch at a table in the shade of plane trees that began at one o'clock and ended when the light changed. Nine nights. France at its most itself.