“Ah, there it is!” says a fellow passenger as we lean against the gunwale. I look up at the steep vineyards that line the riverbank and see an overgrown but legible sign composed of giant capital letters: COTE-ROTIE. For wine lovers, this was the establishing shot we were waiting for on our eight-day Rhône gastro-odyssey from Lyon to Arles. We had reached the Côtes du Rhône! This was our viticultural equivalent of the HOLLYWOOD sign.
Founded in antiquity, boosted by Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, resurrected and refined by the 14th-century Avignonese Papacy, and perfected during the 16th century, the Côtes du Rhône is the second-largest wine-producing area in France, with more than 70,000 hectares under vine in 30 AOC appellations. Among its constituent côtes, the Côte-Rôtie – ‘roasted slope’ – produces the finest reds in the Northern Rhône.
“Who,” I ask the passenger, “are the top producers in the region?”
My friend rattles off a list. “…Guigal, Stéphane Ogier, Réné Rostaing, La Turque, Jamet….” He sighs as we sail downriver. “Shame we can’t explore.”
Resembling an elongated shoebox 105 metres long by 11.4 wide, the Scenic Sapphire is a 76-cabin river cruiser. Besides an unwelcome smell of diesel fumes that defy the air-conditioning, my cabin is adequately comfortable. The food is so-so, but between the barman’s dry Martinis and the senior stewardess’s karaoke, life on board has its moments. The crew are friendly and hard-working; the other passengers, a 70-something mix of British, American, Australian and Kiwi, largely keep themselves to themselves. This is our ‘Scenic space ship’, our module for probing the worlds of Provençal food and wine from the waters of the Rhône River.
The city of Lyon
The Rhône originates in Switzerland. Passing through Lake Geneva, she meanders southwest into France and joins the Saône, her main tributary, at Lyon. Swelled by other branches, the Ardèche, the Isère and the Durance, she surges south with mountain-moving momentum, powering 3% of France’s electricity needs and depositing a vast alluvial delta. On her way, she passes some of the oldest and greatest vineyards in the region.
Before departing Lyon for Arles, we swerve up the Saône into southern Burgundy. Unlike the single-source Rhône, the Saône is the sum of a vascular system of tributaries that veins the map of eastern France. We soon face one of the great challenges of river cruising: low bridges. Drawing on his 36 years experience, Captain Franck Haas checks the Plimsoll line, lowers his retractable bridge, ducks, and clears the spans of Lyon with centimetres to spare.
One of the many stone bridges in Avignon
Cruising north overnight, we awake in the city of Mâcon. Stepping ashore, we motor west into the heart of Le Beaujolais, home of the gamay grape. Burgundy was once blanketed in gamay until 1395 when Philippe the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, upon learning that the Pope disliked his wines, tore up the gamay in rage and planted nobler pinot noir, but strangely left the former to grow in Beaujolais.
While many love the region’s easy drinking, light Beaujolais Nouveau – which often comes with some fanfare around its annual release – fans of a heavier red may be keen to avoid this quick-fermented vin de primeur, by sticking to Beaujolais labelled ‘cru’, denoting the highest-rated wines. In character, the wines of the ten Beaujolais crus – Saint-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Régnié, Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly – hover between a Burgundian pinot noir and a Rhône red.
Mâcon lies within the writ of another famous ingredient: the prized, yellow meat of Bresse chicken. It supposedly inspired Brillat-Savarin, the politician, philosopher, and foodie, to declare, ‘The queen of poultry, the poultry of kings!’
Beautiful sunset over Beaujolais vineyards
Freechoice
Sailing back to Lyon, I’m sure I hear protesting deckchairs being scraped off the top deck as, lighter by 18 hours’ fuel consumption, Scenic Sapphire cleared the bridges by even fewer millimetres than before. When an upriver downpour causes a spike in downriver water levels, the Saône River can often be a captain’s nightmare. As Haas says, “After rain, the Saône rises; the Rhône flows faster.”
Re-joining the Rhône, we thrum south along the great trough carved between the Massif Central and the Alps. Strong currents, variable water levels and the Mistral have always made navigating the Rhône hazardous. Between 1885 and 1905, dredging and engineering works raised the low-water navigable draught to 1.6m. “Some stretches remained impassible,” Haas shares with us. “A boatman stuck in Valence had to message the Swiss to open the barrage at Lake Geneva, and then wait thirty-two hours.”
The Scenic Sapphire sailing on the Rhône
One benefit of the Rhône’s domestication is irrigation. The Rhône Valley today is a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables. Stepping ashore at the Roman city of Vienne, we find the centre ville ablaze with the food market. Sadly, there is no chance of picking up supplies. In an era of centralised provisioning, it is a romantic myth that the chef hops ashore to forage.
When the Romans battled their way up the Rhône in the second century BC, one of the first things they did was plant vineyards, picking up where the Greeks left off in Marseilles in the 6th century BC, when they named the Rhône after the people from Rhodes. Exported downriver in amphorae and 1,300-litre dolia, the wines of Vienne soon rivalled those in Italy. In the 1st century AD, Pliny noted the high prices that Vienne wines fetched in Rome, making it the first French wine to be internationally acclaimed. The hoary remnants of the Romans’ 500-year colonisation remind us of the Rhône’s importance in antiquity. Vienne’s first-century temple to Emperor Augustus and his wife Livia soars above the café district, located two blocks away from the Forum and Theatre.
The rocky scenery floats by in a slow-motion drama of limestone ridges and crags
Passing Valence, we enter the Southern Rhône, land of grenache, a grape often blended with mourvèdre. The rocky scenery floats by in a slow-motion drama of limestone ridges and crags poking through sparse vegetation beneath a flaring sky. Docking at Viviers, near Villa Molard at Donzère, home of the largest known Roman wine cellar, we make an excursion to the medieval village of Grignan, set 25 kilometres to the east.
En route, our English guide taunts us with a rapturous, drizzle-drenched, gourmand’s commentary on the local table; truffles, olives, saucissons and, of course, wine “…In Montélimar, they make nougat from pistachio, almond and honey,” she says. “You can smell the grinding nuts…This is wild-boar country. Marinated for 24 hours in red wine, garlic and herbs, boar makes a lovely daube [stew]. A popular local dish is saucisson sec: pork, fat and herbs stuffed into sausage skins, left for three months, then eaten sliced with Cotes du Rhône. We drink a lot of wine here…” By the time we arrive at Grignan, I’m hallucinating about Provençal food. Sadly, all meals were eaten on board.
Châteauneuf-du-Pape
We throb south. After 24 kilometres of verdant umbrella pines and rocky scrub known as la garrigue, we enter Bollène lock. Built in 1952, 190 metres long by 12 wide, France’s deepest lock is the single most exciting incident in the Rhône’s epic journey. Sitting on the roof deck as we descended 22 metres, I felt like we were sinking into a giant coffin. ‘Avignon’ comes from the Celtic for ‘violent winds’. The city is more famously the former papal seat of the Great Schism: in 1309, Philip IV’s resentment at the election of the deranged Italian Pope Urban VII led him to choose his own pope, Clement V, based in Avignon. For 39 years, two, sometimes three, pontiffs sat simultaneously in the town.
Greedy, corrupt but blessed with good taste, the Avignon popes left their mark on the wine map. Clement V’s family owned an estate in Pessac, southwest of Bordeaux, which is the oldest in Bordeaux today. It still produces wines under the ‘Château Pape Clément’ label. His successor in Avignon, Pope John XXII, performed miracles on the vineyards north of the city near the papal summer residence. Experimenting with grape varieties, he managed to turn the local tread into wine. John’s 18-year pontificate ended with the complex and bold celestial maroon nectar being declared ‘Vin du Pape’ and thereafter ‘Châteauneuf du Pape’, one of the Rhône’s finest and the ‘wine lover’s wine’. Today, the delightful village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is consecrated to wine production, and 321 winemakers are currently based there.
A barrel of Chateauneuf-du-Pape produces more miracles than a church with a thousand saints
Wine is surely the local religion. “A day without wine is a day without sunshine,” one local proclaimed to us. “Like a confessional, it makes people reveal their secrets. A barrel of Chateauneuf-du-Pape produces more miracles than a church with a thousand saints.”
The city of Arles
Upstream of Arles, the Rhône splits into two channels which enclose La Camargue, an 800-square kilometre delta famous for wild horses and flamingos. We fork left and arrive at our terminus. Founded by order of Julius Caesar in 46 BC, Arles was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire. Its ruins include a triumphal arch, a theatre, an amphitheatre and the Emperor Constantine’s baths. Its skyline then was dominated by the Roman Circus, which now holds concerts and Gallic-lite bullfights. I’m sure a Roman popina (wine bar) or two were among the ruins.
Today’s skyline is marked by Frank Gehry’s 56-metre LUMA Tower (2021), an art campus whose crumpled-looking façade evokes the Provençal crags that inspired Vincent Van Gogh. During his 15 months in Arles from 1888-9, Van Gogh knocked out some 300 masterpieces, including his seven sunflower paintings, went mad and cut off his ear. Vincent’s battle with the bottle has been well-documented.
Olive oil production here is another quasi-religion with its own theology
We disembark to inspect an olive oil farm. Provence produces 5,000 tonnes of olive oil each year, the twelfth largest production in the world, and considered among the finest. Olive oil production here is another quasi-religion with its own theology: the oil must use four varieties, Salonenque, Béruguette, Grossane, and Verdale des Bouches-du-Rhône; when harvesting the olives, branches must be raked not shaken; once crushed, the olives must be centrifuged to extract, not press, the oil; and so on and so forth.
During our eight-day cruise, we pass twelve locks and drop 62 metres; we consume 352 kilos of potatoes, 1,600 eggs, 448 litres of milk and 36 kilos of butter. We barely brush the surface of this magical part of France, but it makes me want to return, and eat at some of the restaurants.
