FRANCE
A Country Made for Living
by
PATRICIA STORACE
The ocher-red cliffs I see from the hotel dining-room window look like the smudges of a child’s finger painting, especially when glimpsed through a shimmering double rainbow, an arc of color cutting across the sky. Here in Provence, a Roman colony for some five hundred years and still proud of this heritage, it seems appropriate to view a rainbow as a Roman architectural form, the triumphal arch.
I am at Le Phébus, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the tiny hamlet of Joucas. A pair of silver turtle doves preside over the table. Noiselessly, the server sets before me my first course, a hot cheese soup mysteriously consisting only of an egg enfolded in a tile-shaped pastry. This does not resemble soup. I compose my expression, waiting for enlightenment. She returns, bringing my companion’s petits gris de Provence, those famous snails whose flesh is flavored by their diet of Provençale herbs. These delicate morsels, which the Provençal swear are superior to the more grossly plump snails of Burgundy, are so treasured they even play a role in the local Nativity scenes, in the figure of a snail seller on her way to the stable, bringing her offering to the Holy Family.
An elegant elderly couple, accompanied by a fine dog, are led to a table. They asked permission to bring the dog into the dining room, explaining that it cries piteously if left alone outside but will, they promise, sleep peacefully at their feet while they dine. Later, I hear them administer a gentle, quasiparental scolding to the youthful sommelier, who has recommended, they feel, a bottle on the basis of its costliness rather than its rightful place within the pattern of their dinner. This is not Paris, they rebuke him. With filial courtesy, he describes alternatives. The couple remind him that they expect a good dinner to be a matter not of consumption but of conversation, not of expense but of artistry.
Now the server reappears carrying a pitcher. She stands at a precisely calculated oblique angle to the bowl before me, then pours into it a flood of hot broth. The tuile softens like a Dalí watch, and the egg flows from it, thickening the broth into a rich, integrated whole, with different textures and intensities of flavor. Variations on the theme of cheese, and a wonderfully executed piece of gastronomic theater.
Provence is a place you taste as well as see, and Le Phébus’s menu—which weaves into its text bits of Provençal, a language still studied but rarely heard—is itself an excursion through the region’s history, topography, economy, and, in some ways, its society. Here is a version of a classic cod dish from chef Xavier Mathieu’s great-grandmother Rose. The flavor of Provence is distilled in another dish of carrots cooked in lavender-blossom honey. Fantasias are founded on the region’s olives, lamb, rabbit, red mullet, and chickpea-flour panisses. A fish course is accompanied by a witty, savory play on Provence’s beloved nougat, in this instance one of ricotta, peanuts, herbs, and a confit of citron. A traditional leg of lamb, cooked for seven hours, is innovatively seasoned with cumin—a tribute, I think, to the new repertory brought to the region by North African immigrants. I am reminded of the great Provençal novelist Jean Giono’s definition of the gastronomic experience: “There are things which by flavor or color make you taste joy when you have them on your tongue, and others which make you taste grief. Three parts of joy, one of mourning—that is the taste of life.”
Four hours later, as I leave the restaurant, I think that what I have experienced tonight—from the array of tastes to the gibe at Paris—is nothing less than a portrait of Provence, a place where food represents culture, not gluttony, where the exercise of critical intelligence is itself a voluptuous pursuit, and no genuine delight is divorced from knowledge.
It was Virginia Woolf—like everyone in the Bloomsbury group, a devotee of Provence—who wrote that vacationing in the south of France is “undoubtedly what one will do in Heaven—motoring all day, and eating vast meals, and drinking red wine and liqueurs.”
I myself, however, had long managed to resist the charms of Provence. Heaven for me is one place and one person, and both are my secret. A perfume of the self-consciously and ruthlessly expensive idyll seemed to waft from Provence, not unlike the Hamptons of Long Island. The place emitted a suggestion of a countryside transformed into a precious decor, all ceramic cicadas and “chichi pompons,” as the wonderfully blunt gastronomic historian and radio chronicler Jean-Pierre Coffe once characterized a certain Provençal style—the kind represented by ridiculous tassels flapping from keys, curtains, and tablecloths; I remember a long formal dinner spent with a gargantuan tassel nestled in my lap.
Still, I was willing to explore Provence in spring, fall, or winter, when I might have a chance to glimpse her alone, without her maquillage, her throngs of admirers. I planned an ambitious and not always obviously logical route but one designed to emphasize “Provence Profonde,” the inland area between its great rivers, the Durance to the east and the Rhône to the west. I would linger for the most part in the many-villaged Vaucluse, one of the six départements that officially define the region, and would catch a glimpse of urban Provence in two of its important cities: Aix-en-Provence, its former capital, my first stop; and Avignon, France’s Vatican, one of my last. In between, I would spend two weeks threading my way by car through the region’s defining mountains: Cézanne’s Mont Ste-Victoire, Peter Mayle’s Luberon, and the peak sacred to the Tour de France, Mont Ventoux. I would taste the Provençal Alps and finish in the Dentelles de Montmirail, above the pebbly soil that makes the great wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I would leave as much room as possible for impulsive detours, since famous towns can disappoint (like Isle-sur-la-Sorgue) and obscure ones charm (like Le Barroux). I decided on spring for my tour, when the almond blossoms, irises, and poppies enamel the fields—a compensation for the summer lavender I would miss.
The region is a place of celestial ambitions: The Christmas crèches that are its signature popular art invariably portray Provence as the birthplace of Jesus, with the three Magi wandering among lavender sellers and top-hatted mayors. Economically, it is surely a land of miracles, with sheepfolds and silkworm sheds reincarnated as multi-million-dollar holiday houses and recently repopulated villages now the hideaways of movie stars and investment bankers.
But this is nothing new. For centuries, it seems, nearly as many people have aspired to Provence as to heaven itself: Greeks, Romans, Moors, Ligurians, Jews, Spanish, Italians, Armenians. The current contenders are English and North Africans—as well as Japanese, judging by the busloads of food and wine pilgrims. And Americans too, of course, for if Boston is the capital of Puritan America, then Provence is the capital of hedonist America—communicated to the United States by Richard Olney, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, and Alice Waters, among others. Olney and Child both had houses in Provence; Waters expressed her love for Provence by naming her California restaurant Chez Panisse (after the Provençal character from Marcel Pagnol’s “The Fanny Trilogy” films) and, even more profoundly, by translating for her own country a Provençal dream of cooking, of pleasure, as the foundation of life.
As always, Paradise has its snakes. Provence is filled with the evidence of both settled and unfinished quarrels: the feudal family struggles that continued even after the region was incorporated into the French kingdom in 1481; the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics; the mortal battles between the French throne and the Knights Templar, the Christian military order whose wealth the French king coveted; the disputes between monarchists and republicans during the Revolution; the hydra-headed conflicts of the Second World War; and the ongoing spats between village and village, vineyard and vineyard, neighbor and neighbor, over water. But this history of darkness is somehow ignored by visitors; Provence has entered their collective unconscious as the sun-buttered, lavender-laved symbol of bliss, revealing the secret motive of travel itself: to get away from it all. The most perfect of holidays would be to escape from death. Heaven’s our destination.
Aix-en-Provence was certainly Thomas Jefferson’s idea of heaven. “The man who shoots himself in the climate of Aix must be a bloody-minded fellow indeed,” he wrote during a visit in 1787. “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven?” This former capital of Provence, founded by the Romans around 120 B.C. for its springs, does honor to its essential resource, clothing its waters in the glory of the fountains studding the city. The Provençal novelist Pierre Magnan writes that in his native territory of Alpine Provence, water is so scarce that churchgoers bless themselves from the smallest holy water fonts in the world. I came to notice how many villages, with a poignant magic, evoke water in their names—Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Pernes-sur-Fontaine, Greoux-les-Bains, Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, to name a few. When I first set foot in Aix, I saw the city’s fountains as elegant urban decorations; by the end of the journey, they seemed instead outdoor chapels, places to worship water itself.
A bride and groom (during the May Day holiday weekend, Aix teems with men in morning suits and women in white lace) emerge from Ste-Marie-Madeleine, the church where Cézanne was baptized. They cross the Place des Prêcheurs, where the Marquis de Sade, a prominent Provençal noble, and his valet were executed in effigy in 1772, as a symbol of social death, after being convicted of violently mistreating a group of prostitutes he held captive in nearby Marseille. The bridal couple, though, are not concerned with these ghosts; they are on their way to be photographed near a fountain, making their city’s waters a part of their sacrament.
Aix-en-Provence exists fluidly in many centuries. On an errand, I find myself in front of a shop that transports me to the Middle Ages—the storefront of a writer of letters and documents, who offers as one specialty translations into a pre-Islamic Yemenite language. A few doors down, a pharmacy with an encyclopedic collection of sunscreens—and an even more comprehensive selection of cellulite remedies—returns me to this century. Prominently displayed on one wall is a laminated poster with images of edible and toxic mushrooms. In France, mushroom gatherers may bring their baskets for consultations with pharmacists trained to distinguish between the delicious and the dangerous. On the street again, passing through a splendid square, I look up. Even overhead, on the eighteenth-century facade of the post office, are the waters—this time in the form of a god and goddess, personifying the Rhône and the Durance. The Rhône, massive and muscular, carries an oar, as is appropriate for a river critical to trade between northern and southern Europe. The luscious nymph Durance, as the giver of Provençal fertility, holds a cornucopia, and one of her legs dangles off the pediment, a witty allusion, possibly, to her propensity to overflow.
Late on May Day morning, impromptu stands spring up on the margins of the highway, selling pots and bouquets of muguet (lily of the valley), the traditional May Day gift. I am on my way to a dégustation, as quintessential a custom in Provence as tango dancing is in Argentina. The Commanderie de la Bargemone, a vineyard in the countryside neighboring Aix, is in its own way a dream of Provence. Built on the foundations of a garrison of Knights Templar, it became the property of a family of Provençal nobles, whose vineyards were eventually destroyed by the phylloxera virus. In the 1970s, the deteriorating buildings and vineyards were purchased by a wealthy industrialist who had been a hero of the French Resistance, and restored with the help of Claude Marriottini, who grew up on the property.
What I see is nothing less than a resurrection, a vision of French country life from a book of hours: A grand manor house emerges from the earth like a kind of geode. I wander the grounds, through an orchard with apricot, cherry, pear, and apple trees, past a yard with fat, beautifully kept chickens. Inside the cellars, I taste the Commanderie’s wines; its white, its rosé, its robust, barrel-aged red, whose ambitions are revealed by its name: Cuvée Tournebride, named for a champion stallion that sired a number of horses at the Commanderie.
Back in the car, heading toward the Luberon Mountains, I turn on Beur (slang for “Arab”) FM and listen to Arabic-language hip-hop while driving past vineyards blanketed with poppies. It is time to venture into the core of Provence; the region is above all a mosaic of villages, and travel here is less a matter of making climactic visits to monuments and landmarks than of meeting villages with almost humanly distinct characters, perched on cliffs, hidden behind strips of rock, expansive and confident on plains. They are all surprisingly different from one another, even when the distances between them are abbreviated. The guiding domestic impulse seems a distinctive feature of travel here—the magnet is not so much what you would like to see but where in Provence you would make your home, where you would like to live. There is an odd sense, at each destination, that you are not merely visiting but that you have settled here, however briefly. What Provence has to offer its visitors, above all, is a moment of its life.
The road to Cabrières d’Aigues, some forty miles to the north of Aix, is a pattern of sun-drenched fields, young olive plantations, peaceful valleys, and children wearing Provençal-patterned skirts. The prints are descendants of the indiennes, the imported cottons from India that were the inspiration for the now-famous Provençal cloth industry. This countryside gives a sheltered sensation, as of coves and inlets, as if the waters of the warm sea that covered it some ten million years ago had simply been peeled back to reveal it. The ground scattered with snail shells reminds me that escargots are simply shellfish that live on land; it is silly to be any more squeamish about a snail than about an oyster.
The exquisite illusion of peace along this route is in conflict with the remains of the plague wall to the north of the village, a wishful safeguard against the eighteenth-century epidemic that terrorized the countryside. It is also at odds with the brutal history outlined at Cabrières’s Protestant church. For centuries, the Provençal mountains have been a refuge for resisters and dissidents of various kinds, and the sweet valleys have seen atrocities perpetuated on the pre-Protestant Vaudois sect, Catholics, royalists, republicans, Protestants, Jews, and anti-Fascists. Throughout Provence, you can see buildings ruined or damaged by human folly, a force more unkind than time. In Cabrières’s air are traces of fear—the memories of crouching by the hill, praying against detection. From the beleaguered Protestants of Cabrières, whose eighteenth-century church, renovated in 1951, was a room above an olive-oil mill, I drive to one of the seats of Catholic Provence, the château of Ansouis, held for eight centuries by the same family, the Sabrans, who inhabit it still. The château floats above its shimmering village like a perfectly cut and set jewel; hanging gardens jet from its walls like a gem’s brilliant refractions.
Albert Camus used to enjoy watching the soccer games in Lourmarin, a village of apparently idyllic prosperity some seven miles southeast of Cabrières. As I come up on it, I encounter what looks like a roadside vegetable stand—it turns out to be a licensed distributor of foie gras. In Lourmarin, each house is more inventively charming than the last, a peacock rainbow of painted shutters and rose-draped doors.
The soccer games themselves are still played, luxuriously, on emerald fields at the foot of a château that once belonged to the powerful Agoult family, who held a network of fiefdoms throughout the region. Among the Agoult descendants were Marie de Flavigny, the mistress of Franz Liszt, and her daughter, Cosima, who married Richard Wagner. Provence still has a reputation as a region in which power and influence are concentrated in families, whether titled or peasant, a country where a well-placed cousin or sibling is a substantial advantage. The Agoults incarnate that characteristic on a grand scale.
The painstakingly restored château, now host to visiting artists and prestigious summer music festivals, is proof that Lourmarin’s seemingly effortless beauty is hard-won. At the turn of the century, it was a ruin of crumbling stones and floors upended by tree roots, a place used as a midway camping point by Gypsies on their annual pilgrimage to Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer to celebrate their patron saint, Sarah, supposedly the maid to saints Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome. But Provence’s encompassing loveliness is such that it mysteriously reverses the normal course of events; here, lost is found, and ruins fall not into destruction but into ever greater beauty.
It is in a very different kind of building that I spend the night, a fifteenth-century fortified farmhouse turned bed-and-breakfast, set among vineyards, newly leafed cherry orchards, and plashing fountains. There are parts of the world that attract visitors by offering them a sojourn in their private or media-made fantasies, writ large in the form of extravagant hotels. Provence, though, wants to offer the traveler an imagination of itself, a momentary dream of Provençal life: if anything, the traveler becomes the mirror in which the region can gaze at its image, and reflect. And so I find myself in this classic Provençal mas, a complex of buildings set around a central farmhouse and including some combination of stables, sheepfold, stone fountains, cypresses, and plane trees. Often one building was a silkworm nursery, until the late nineteenth century an important industry here, one colored by an eerie parody of maternity: The worms, sometimes incubated between the breasts of the women who reared them, would be assiduously fed with quantities of mulberry leaves, and then killed before they could leave their finished cocoons, nurtured to death.
The next morning, a long walk is in order, so I go to the nearby clifftop village of Goult, another Agoult family village, and climb uphill toward its windmill. A distinguished-looking middle-aged woman carrying a bouquet of wild irises and poppies—they grow in cascades on the hillsides, and anyone is allowed to pick a handful—urges me to take the path through the woods toward the village’s restored olive terraces, to better understand the old agricultural ways.
The woods smell of rosemary, chamomile, thyme, and wild mint; on the path, I pass a borie, a conical stone hut built for shepherds or tools. I stroll beside a wall perforated with niches for beehives. The steep terraces look like a separate village, a village belonging to the trees and crops. On the way back, I see an inviting path cutting deep into a cool glade, but a sign warns: Access to the truffle beds strictly forbidden. Truffle poaching is rife in Provence; one of the most successful savants of truffle culture, a Provençal dentist named Jean-Marie Rocchio, has written that the practice has become so sophisticated that poachers even make use of infrared technology to detect the beds.
I choose a restaurant called Clementine, in Ménerbes (a village that seems as narrow as a tunnel), partly for its panoramic mountain views and partly because of the controlled experiment I am conducting. My theory is that a restaurant which takes public responsibility for “repas de noces” will have in its kitchen a local cook of some distinction. The French take their wedding feasts very seriously; in wedding albums, I have seen nearly as many close-ups of principal dishes as portraits of the bride. A blanquette de veau with morels justifies the theory, as does the house white, produced with grapes from the proprietor’s own vineyards.
My next stop, Cavaillon, a town that seems startingly bustling after a series of country villages, is announced by an enormous sculpted muskmelon in the center of a traffic roundabout. Cavaillon is known for its melons: Alexandre Dumas famously accepted a yearly quantity of the fruit in exchange for supplying the town library with his collected works. I follow the signs to the local synagogue, made a museum in 1924. Housed in an eighteenth-century building that served a community of Jews who had originally come to Cavaillon in the fifteenth century under the protection of the Avignon popes, the synagogue shares the unusual joie-de-vivre and sensuality of Provençal ecclesiastical decoration, a confection of green and gold and floral motifs.
Circling back past a shop of jeweled Moroccan wedding dresses, I stop in the plaza outside the town hall, getting a glimpse of Cavaillon’s gastronomic livelihood. Here are posted the dates and rules for hunting such prey as partridge, hare, pheasant, and rabbit and fishing of sea and river lampreys and both red and green frogs. It suddenly seems not only unpleasant to leave before fall but downright foolish.
I don’t sulk, though, for there is still opportunity ahead: a brief taste of the Provençal Alpines. Up here, among chalky cliffs and farmhouses that seem to float in velvety green valleys, there is a timeless silence, broken only by the equally timeless music of children’s play. A road sign with a drawing of a sheep warns drivers—Attention: Moutons, and the fields above and below me are thick with ewes and baby lambs drifting like white blossoms on the green carpet. A landscape of natural hiding places, this was also Resistance country during World War II. The Provençal mistral winds, though, which at their worst are said to be able to strip the horns from a bull, posed new and unexpected dangers during the war, sometimes making landings on the camouflaged airstrips impossible, or blowing dropped matériel and provisions out of range. The beauty of this day makes that agony present: This is now, and was then, a country made for living, not for killing.
The radio announcer is advertising a weekend market featuring foods from local artisans in a parody of the breakneck American radio style: “Everything to satisfy the educated and passionate gourmand, which you certainly are.” It is noon, he says, and he wishes an excellent appetite to all his listeners. The hostess of the fifteenth-century priory at the foot of Simiane-la-Rotonde, where I am staying, makes a quick telephone call on my behalf to the village of Banon to ask the restaurant on the square to keep its wood-burning oven hot enough for another customer. I make the short drive through silvery green fields of lavender and the brilliant green fields of wheat, whose legacy is not only apparent in Provençale food but in its distinctive breadmaking furniture: the kneading table, the bread-keeper, the buffets with mechanisms for shifting flour, all sought after in the antiques markets of Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.
Banon is famous for its chestnut leaf–wrapped goat cheese, so my lunch is a wood-oven pizza topped with chévre de pays, eaten on the town square underneath the blossoming chestnut trees. Here the accents are unabashedly chantant, with the melodic vowels that distinguish Provençal speech. The Catholic youth group is holding a couscous dinner fund-raiser, proof of this dish’s now-solid roots in France. I find a much more obviously native specialty in the shop of a gifted charcutier: Maurice Melchio, whose range of sausages—flavored variously with pine nuts, fennel, and savory—give new meaning to the phrase être bien dans sa peau (“to be comfortable in one’s own skin”). More surprisingly, tiny Banon is home to another kind of feast—a feast of reason, as Monsieur Melchio describes it, in the form of Le Bleuet, one of France’s great independent bookstores—and also to a May book festival that brings writers and readers to town to share picnics, wine, and literature (another Provençal melange of knowledge and delight).
May 8 is a holiday in Europe commemorating the end of World Ware II; there are processions in the villages and cities, and I hear elegiac music wherever I stop. Several large new wreaths decorate the foot of the war memorial in the square at Barbentane, a château and village on the edge of the Alps and just south of Avignon, a fifty-mile drive from Banon. The château, nicknamed the Petite Trianon of the Sun, was refurbished by a scion of the family who was Louis XV’s ambassador to Florence, and survived the Revolution with even its superb furniture intact. It possesses a kind of architectural nostalgia for Italy, a domestic elegance, an air of having been created by inhabitants who took personal delight in conceiving it, evidenced by such details as the splendid three-hundred-year-old plane trees in the garden, imported from Turkey. The terrace overlooking the garden is punctuated by witty statues of eighteenth-century sirens, mermaids with chic laced bodices; one statue of a wild boar wears a smile of benign disillusionment, a creature that would have delighted Lewis Carroll; surely, he is the Cheshire boar. Inside, I covet a group of salon chairs, covered in needlepoint with imagery drawn from La Fontaine’s fables; the wooden frames of the chairs are still painted black, a sign of mourning when the family learned that Marie Antoinette had been killed.
The village itself has a form not unlike a croquembouche, the French wedding cake of caramelized cream puffs; it rises from a rocky plateau as if positioned on a tray, climbing in tiers of stone houses, labyrinthine passages sugared with roses and honeysuckle, crowned at its summit by a stone tower. Aware that the still-sacred family lunch hours are upon me, I hurry back to the main square, catching sight through a window of a chef tenderly handing plates to his wife and little boy at a white-clothed table in his now-empty restaurant. From a bakery called Chez François et Céline, I manage to buy the last loaf, cracked but still warm, which I supplement with ham, sheep’s cheese, and fava beans, young enough to eat raw. In Provence, the notion of buying local food does not just mean food produced nearby; it also means food of a particular character and flavor, the essence of a climate, a soil, a relationship evolved between the earth and the people who cultivate it. More and more these days, restaurant menus here are making the sources of their produce, cheeses, fish, and meat as identifiable as the producers of their wines.
The proprietress offers me some handsome strawberries imported from Spain, then the famous strawberries of the nearby market town of Carpentras. The imported strawberries are not bad, though a bit taut, as if they have had plastic surgery; the Carpentras strawberries, however, are superb, as perfumed as flowers, and so melting that eating one is like a kiss on the lips. They are, though, so fragile that the lady insists on packing them herself, warning me to eat them today. I hurry for shelter to escape the passionate downpour whose approach has given me a glimpse of the cold and severity of a Provençal winter. A group of Muslim ladies are not so lucky; their heavy robes and veils are left soaked.
I have been saving the Rhône Valley, that needlepoint tapestry of vineyards, for last. Here, Séguret, overlooking a landscape out of a pastoral symphony, deserves its designation as one of France’s most beautiful villages; its stone buildings set into a steep hill and walls shadowed with fruit trees are as sinuous and elegant as if an architect had designed the whole village as an ensemble. I fall in love with a group of santons, those painted clay crèche figures of villagers offering their lavender, cheeses, and game to the Christ child; after encountering them, it seems right to follow the Nativity toward the papacy, so I take the direction of Avignon.
In the walled heart of Avignon, echoes of which its native writer Henri Bosco later found in the walled cities of Morocco, a nun trailing some twenty sweetly singing children leads them toward a curving passageway, where all but their song disappears. It is a city of mysterious passages, curves, and apertures, designed for sudden encounters, perhaps one reason for its importance in the history of love. Petrarch famously met Laura here, and wrote over the years the cycle of sonnets that made even Casanova weep. John Stuart Mill is buried here, in the cemetery of St-Veran, the Père-Lachaise of the south. When his wife died unexpectedly during a stay at Avignon’s Hôtel d’Europe, Mill purchased a house near St-Veran so he could visit her grave every day for the rest of his life.
After Séguret, I drive to Laurence Féraud’s vineyard, Domaine du Pégaü, in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. In this land of profound wine-making, where a vintner’s artful blending of the thirteen varieties of grape permitted to this appellation is a closely guarded secret, Féraud is queen, the producer of a cult wine, Château Pégaü, which earned a Robert Parker rating of one hundred points in 1998. From what looks like a field office, she emerges—small, dark, and indomitable, a dog at her heels. “Everything is going wrong today,” she says good-humoredly, possessed by the problems of a shipment to Taiwan. For her, a year is not just a collection of events but a destiny to make into wine. When she thinks of 2003, she remembers that the grapes were ripe in August but their skins were still soft. This was the year of risk in her private zodiac: She daringly left them on the vine. The idiosyncratic soils of her vineyards, their clays, their pebbles, are as intimate to her as a child’s personality is to its mother. In fact, her description of harvesting her grapes by hand is one of harassed but expert maternity: “I treat my vineyards like I treat my kitchen,” she says. “I choose the vineyards to pick from by the smell and touch of the fruit…. My employees become my bosses. They see everything from high on their tractors. They shout, ‘Laurence, pick here, pick quicker.’”
Laurence’s ancestors are winemakers; in fact, one grandmother was a vigneron. She says that she hopes her children will want to do this work. “I teach them by teaching them to eat well,” she says. “It is not proper not to give the children good products. It is in eating well that we develop the taste in wine.” Perhaps I imagine it, but I think I taste that depth of relationship to the land in her wine, its concentrated impact the work of someone whose life’s work is making life. A fleshy partridge is walking between the vines like a gleaner as I leave.
It is time for me to go. I drive up looping roads into the Dentelles de Montmirail, that natural Parthenon of limestone cliffs, on roads that give the sensation less of driving than of flight. The mountains are crowned with great arches and battlements of limestone, like the châteaux of archangels. In the village of Beaumes-de-Venise, I look out over the tiaras of vineyards planted in intricate and complex formations on the slopes of these wild mountains. They are the image of the ancient aspiration to draw fruit from stone, to civilize. For me, as for so many others in centuries past and still to come, this is the landscape of the labor of humanism—not of heaven but of civilization itself, of savoir-vivre.
That evening, at the Auberge Saint Roch, I order a first course of foie gras and an aperitif of Beaumes-de-Venise, a wine which tastes of apricots, butter, and honey, and holds such a clear, sustained pattern of flavor in the mouth that it is like drinking dissolving lace. Perhaps it is the result of a day spent visiting the papal palace and tasting the papal wines, but it strikes me that the Provençal have performed a marvelous theological sleight of hand. Provence is not heaven after all, but earth. Unlike Adam and Eve, the Provençal have made a garden where knowledge is at the very heart of pleasure, and is essential to all that can be loved in life; they have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and unlike their sacred ancestors, found it not bad at all.
ULTIMATE PROVENCE
The best tastes, sights, and smells from the land where pleasure was born
BEST OLIVE OIL
Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is one of the most beautiful little towns in Provence. It is famous for its antiques stores, its open-air food market (Thursday and Sunday mornings), and for a shop called Les Délices du Luberon (1, Avenue du Partage des Eaux, 33-4-90-20-77-37; delices-du-luberon.fr.), which is really more of mini–olive museum that also happens to sell sensational tapenade as well as hundreds of different olive oils.
BEST ROMANRUINS
Between Orange, Arles, Nîmes, and the Pont du Gard, there’s plenty to choose from, but the Roman town of Glanum near St. Rémy gives you the best idea of how the Romans in Provence actually lived. A triumphal arch marks the entrance to the site, and you can wander through the ruins of two temples, the Forum, and a grand private villa, its less attractive stone kitchen sink still intact at the back. Glanum has the added advantage of being only just over a mile from St. Rémy, with its chic shops, cafés, and restaurants.
BEST PROVENÇAL FABRICS
The origin of this brightly colored traditional cotton fabric dates back to the seventeenth century, when the Compagnie des Indes began importing printed cottons from India. Les Olivades (Chemin des Indienneurs, 33-4-90-49-19-19; lesolivades.fr), which is based in Saint Etienne du Grès, in the Alpilles, is the only company left in Provence that still maintains traditional means of production. Its fabrics are sold by the yard and made into ready-to-wear items available in its shops throughout Provence.
BEST LAVENDER TRAILS
There are six different lavender trails in the region where you can explore all the deliciously scented aspects of this quintessential Provençal plant. The trails lead through some of the less-traveled villages and delve into everything from traditional folk medicine to garden design, perfume, the distillation process, and aroma-therapy (for trail information, contact Routes de la Lavande, 33-4-75-26-65-90; routes-lavande.com).
BEST SANTONS DE PROVENCE
Christmas in Provence is celebrated with feasting and Mass on Christmas Eve, and also with re-creations of the Nativity scene, using small figurines called santons. These crèches became popular after the Revolution closed down the churches in 1793, and the region remained faithful to its religious traditions. The figurines are usually made of clay, but they can be wood, or even bread dough. Whatever the material, the scenes inevitably represent the Nativity as if it had taken place in a Provençal village, with garlic sellers, bakers, and butchers all represented. The best is Paul Fouque in Aix-en-Provence (65, Cours Gambetta, 33-4-42-26-33-38; santons-fouque.com).
BEST POTTERY
Less famous and, mercifully, much less crowded than Vallauris, where Picasso made his ceramics, the small town of Apt is home to one of the masters of the art, Antony Pitot. His glazed earthenware, known as faïence, draws on the traditions of the countryside, where the familiar ocher tones and greens of Provençal pottery are enhanced by a special marbling effect. Call ahead for an appointment at his atelier in Apt (RN100 Goult; 33-4-90-72-22-79).
BEST MOUNTAIN…AND VIEW
Known as the “Giant of Provence,” Mont Ventoux is, at 6,273 feet, the tallest mountain in France between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Petrarch, clearly a man with brains and brawn, made the first recorded ascent in 1336, and you can either follow in his arduous footsteps or be a wimp and drive to the top. The mountain roads are still often included in the Tour de France (although the British cyclist Tommy Simpson suffered a fatal heart attack during the leg of the race on Mont Ventoux in 1967). The view from the top is, not surprisingly, quite magnifique.
BEST ROSÉ
Not all bottles marked “Rosé de Provence” were created equal. Don’t be seduced by the rosy pink color, or the pretty label, or the laughable price you’ll see on any wine list or the supermarket shelf. Instead, go straight to the tippy top—Domaines Ott. The Ott family has been producing wine since 1896, and although they make some perfectly respectable reds and whites, it is their rosés that they are famous for. Somebody had the brilliant idea of putting this rosy nectar into bottles based on the sexy shape of the Roman amphora. When it comes to tasting the wine of the gods of Provence, accept no substitutes (domaines-ott.com).
BEST (AND MOST TERRIFYING) DRIVE
There are plenty of good reasons to go to Cassis, a small fishing port just east of Marseille. The tourists may outnumber the fishermen these days, but the restaurants on the port still serve some of the best fish dishes in this part of France. But the real excitement here lies in a curvy, vertiginous road known as La Route de Crêtes, which runs along the cliffs of the Cap Canaille. It is 1,310 feet down to the sea from its highest point at La Grande Tete, but be warned: If the mistral is acting up and you are not driving a Hummer, you are in serious danger of being swept away, and not just by the spectacular view.