An Epicurean Journey through France

Romance awaits in every Parisian arrondissement: an affair with a Latin Quarter bookshop, an admiring glance in the Musée Rodin, a starlit walk along the Seine’s storied banks. It might be as spirited as the Saint-Ouen flea market, or as solemn as the Panthéon, as fleeting as an éclair au chocolat from the Rue Montorgueil, or as languid as a stroll through the streets of Montmartre, where every lamplit corner is another postcard. 

As France’s longest river turns west, the Loire Valley unfurls with regal beauty: a UNESCO-listed landscape of vineyards, elegant towns and an embarrassment of grand chateaux, rising above the forests like something from a French fairytale. Many of these grand piles are old medieval fortresses, while others were built as Renaissance playgrounds for French nobility, all soaring turrets and banquet halls, still lauded for their extravagant architecture and rambling, flowery grounds.

Not all Bordeaux’s pleasures come by the glass: a deal with a Chartrons antique dealer, the taste of a rum-sweet canelé, the 18th-century grandeur of the Place de la Bourse, reflected in the shimmering pool of the Miroir d’Eau. But Bordeaux’s rich, full-bodied heritage is hard to resist, be it on a bar’s cobbled terrace or at La Cité du Vin, a slick museum charting the long, lofty history of wine here.