Exploring the luscious French countryside in Provence, that provides breathtaking views and gastronomic trails

IF YOU drive through Paris at dawn, you will see people in lamp-lit cafés, sitting over breakfast before work. The indomitable Gauls resist the Starbucks invasion: to eat while walking is uncivilised when you’re French. Here croissants are in their proper place, curling quiet on china plates, and coffee on these boulevards is drunk from china cups.

Le Train Bleu, the art nouveau café at the Gare de Lyon, is loyal to this Gallic custom. Beneath painted ceilings and golden frescoes, we order coffee from leather chairs, watched by the station cat. It stretches on a marble sill — dignity in feline form — scornful of those who are always moving on.

Mid-morning on the TGV, the fast train to the south. A line of men across a field, striding, bearing guns; their dogs, ahead, flush partridge from the flummoxed grass. Charolais cattle, white as their fabled milk, graze amidst the green and gold as the train flies by.

In the carriage, South Africans and Australians tell dirty jokes and laugh out loud, while Americans turn the landscape into data with their blogs and tweets.

In Paris it was raining, but the south is washed with light. An impressionist’s autumn sun paints yellow leaves on poplar trees. On a bus now, we pass L’Isle sur la Sorgue, where antique shops flourish, as did travel writer Peter Mayle, no hero to the locals. He could leave after A Year in Provence. Those who remain are sentenced to a lifetime of pouring pastis and saying: “Yes, you can see Peter’s house from here.”

But this is the quiet season.

Almond, peach and apricot trees stand fallow, the ground is red with apples. Our destination is Le Jardin du Quai, a bistro in an orchard, where Michelin-starred chef Daniel Hebet calls us to the kitchen to watch how wizards work. On the train we ate from a bedizened Ladarée box. Said to be the best macaroons in Paris, these rainbow dainties tasted like their colours: chocolate, raspberry, rosewater, lavender, pistachio, vanilla and sunshine.

Now we learn to make them. Hebet whisks and beats and measures temperature, pipes perfect circles on giant trays. We try to follow, and after lunch (farm chicken with courgettes and almonds, white beans in fresh tomato sauce — begone the canned imposters) here come our macaroons. Crisp and chewy, subtly sweet and sandwiched with crème fraîche, they bear no resemblance to that common beast, the meringue.

On to Avignon, home of a secondary pope in 1309, when one was not enough. Now just the papal seal looks down from its walled fortress upon the square.

A saxophone keens across cobblestones, alleyways are hung with tablecloths for sale. Lavender, honey and embroidery are today’s holy relics. Hungry again, we eat steaming onion soup from white tureens sealed with melted cheese in what was once the cloakroom of a medieval palace — back when cloakrooms were for cloaks and bathrooms for barbarians.

It is late when we reach our most elegant hotel in Aix-en-Provence, where my room lights will not work. A sortie to the desk yields reinforcements, who try, and fail, and discuss the state of the fuses.

With charming shrugs they suggest I keep the TV on.

They are French.

I forgive them.

Morning and in the streets of Aix are shoppers wearing coats and hats. Even the falling leaves are well turned out, formal in their browns and greys. Called as always to the market by the magnetic pull of vegetables, I pass chocolate shops, pastry shops, macaroon shops, toy shops filled with painted playthings made of tin. No plastic here. In the central square, fragrant as a rainwashed garden, are mountains of chestnuts, pears, chicory, radishes, cheeses and cantaloupe melons from Cavaillon. A priest examines heads of lettuce while two old women argue over home-pressed olive oil. Lingering to look at lettuce has made me late. Losing my way, I find a poster shop and enter for two reasons: “Can you tell me where I am? And do you have any Tintin posters?” The manageress laughs, calls her staff over. “You mean Tarng-Tarng,” she says. They all laugh.

“That ’s what I meant, and I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“But you must say it properly,” she insists.

“Oh all right. Do you have any TARNGTARNG posters?”

“No, ” she says.

They laugh some more.

Breathlessly back on the bus with vineyards flashing past, purple, gold and amber against a lavender sky, set off by silver olive groves. We are going to the Luberon, a national park where wine is made, by, among others, the Parmentiers of Château la Dorgonne. These visits are arranged by Trafalgar’s Be My Guest initiative, a good reason to be part of a tour group. Locals who own restaurants, castles, olive presses and vineyards act as hosts, sharing their largesse as they would with friends.

The largesse here starts with a cellar tour by bright-eyed Belgian Nicolas Parmentier, among barrels the colour of autumn leaves and a damp smell of grape must. “Boutique wine” is a term tossed about far too casually when you consider the exclusively tailored product made by this family. Each vine is allowed to retain only four bunches of grapes, which are tended like prize racehorses. The leaves on the east side are cut back by hand for morning sun, and if the grapes don’t get plump enough, the leaves on 
the west side receive the same treatment.

And that’s just the start of it.

We drink over lunch in the family’s château, with its copper Virginia creeper and blue shutters. Terrine of fresh herbs and “stew of bull” — beef slow-cooked in red wine. A New Zealander at my table is embarrassed when her plate, wiped clean with sourdough bread, is removed by a puzzled Parmentier daughter, who asks: “Why did you not eat?” Three types of chèvre follow, made from the milk of Parmentier goats: one natural, one with mustard seeds and paprika, one in a fine ash coating served with Parmentier olive oil to cut the acidity of the cheese.

Some take coffee under the plane trees, others cannot refuse more Château la Dorgonne. Nicolas’s uncle Boudoin, named after a Belgian king, pours the wine and introduces his dogs, Mongoust and No-name. He points to the elderly horses grazing in a field below the château. They are his babies, he says, the reason he needs no wife, which leads to requests from assorted women in our party to remain on this olivestudded, vine-clad hillside of plenty.

We take the Aurelian highway through more of Provence, thus called because it was the first Roman-owned province not on the Italian peninsula. The highway, built for Marcus Aurelius, is in good shape, but then the Romans made good roads, as Asterix and Obelix never tire of pointing out. These ancient links proliferate in the French countryside, and in the food.

Village restaurants offer a menu — here it means a three-course special of the day, not a static list — of beautiful regional dishes for around 20 euros. On our way back to Aix we stop in Fontaine de Vaucluse for scallops and fresh trout in a restaurant set over a mill wheel. Green lights reflect in the river rushing darkly from a spring nearby, the same notorious spring that starred in the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources.

We leave Aix before first light (the fuse in my room has been fixed by the underground resistance) for Nice, where at Côte d’Azur airport, a sign, instead of “drop and go”, reads “kiss and fly”. One of our group laments the loss of Uncle Boudoin.

We remind her that we are flying to Rome, where Berlusconi may mistake her for his niece.

— Gallo Images