Places to visit

Avignon wine centre

April 2016 will see the opening in Avignon of the Carre du Palais, a wine centre where you will find everything you could possibly want to know about the wines of the Rhone valley.

Located in the old France Bank, on Place Square, the centre will contain a wine school, a wine bar serving the local AOC wines, a gastronomic restaurant and a larger bistro, a boutique and a hotel/residence, all overlooking the surrounding historical monuments.

Sète

Department: Hérault
Region: Languedoc-Roussillon

Sète is one of those places you won't ever seek out, but will delight on finding, especially if seafood is high on your culinary agenda. On the edge of the Thau lagoon, renowned for its oysters, Sète is a seafoodies' joy; its narrow streets crammed with restaurants.

I arrive in Sète, on the so-called Italian Peninsula, just as my stomach is chiming twelve, and instantly fall foul of the tourism blurb that waxes lyrical about the pleasures of the oysters of Bouzigues and Mèze, and sipping a glass of the local Picpoul-de-Pinet on the Quai de la Marine. Well, there are just so many red rags this particular bull can take before the drive for new culinary experience kicks in. There are numerous quayside eateries in Sète offering a bewildering array of sea food, so many in fact that choosing somewhere to stop for lunch could take all day. In the end I settle for the Restaurant de la Criée, and order a Poëlée d’écrevisses fraiche à la Provençale, very much a hands-on and messy experience, but huge fun, so fresh the prawns are still kicking, and imbued with so much garlic and herbs that afterwards my breath can kill at forty paces.

As I await its arrival a woman passer-by approaches and asks me if I regularly eat here. I fib a bit and say that I do, ‘It’s excellent’, I said.

She and her husband sit at the next table and enjoy lunch every bit as much as I do. As I leave, I glance over and ask, ‘Tout va bien?’. She smiles, ‘Merci, tout va très bien.’

As I saunter away, I couldn't help noticing that a mantle of silence had descended on Sète, disturbed only by subdued conversation, the popping of corks and the irritating sound of young men who charge around the streets on mopeds emitting a noise that is illegally loud in proportion to some inadequacy in their lives. Apart from that, the town is at munch.