A Day Among the Vines

Forty minutes from the old town, the road climbs out of the Var valley into another climate — olive terraces, dry-stone walls, and vines with the sea glittering far below. The estates of Bellet are family-scale: a morning visit means the cellar, the vines and the tasting with the people who made the wine, not a tour group.

Taste the Braquet rosé that never leaves the region, and the Folle Noire — 'mad black' — that gives Bellet reds their peppery, mountain edge. In September you may land in the middle of the harvest, which no one ever forgets.

Twenty minutes across the hills, the village of Saint-Jeannet sits under its great limestone cliff — the Baou — with terraces looking down the whole valley to the sea. Lunch here is the hinge of the day: long, local, and unhurried, the way wine country insists.

The village lanes deserve half an hour after coffee. Painters kept coming here for the light on the cliff; you will see why.

A second estate in the afternoon completes the picture — smaller pours, better questions, and a boot that clinks discreetly on the way home. By six you are back in the old town, which is the real advantage of this wine country: it is the only one in France where the tasting ends with a swim.

Book the two estates ahead — they are small, and the good tables in the hills fill early. The day runs beautifully from April to October, and best of all in the harvest weeks of September.