The ultimate cheese and wine party
Giles Milton heads for the Jura – home to towering crags, gorgeous villages ... and endless fromage
ILAY in my four-poster bed and dreamed that I was being fed cheese and wine at three-hourly intervals. And then I realised that it wasn’t a dream at all and that I had indeed consumed cheese and wine throughout the day. Even the drink before dinner had been served with a platter of fromage.
Over-indulgence is inevitable when you visit the Jura region of eastern France. But the local food is so good that it makes for a uniquely enjoyable experience.
The Jura is rarely visited by British holidaymakers. Most people zoom southwards on the Autoroute du Soleil, unaware that the mountainous countryside to their left is like something from a children’s storybook. It’s a rustic landscape of high pastures and folk-tale forests. You half expect to see elves and pixies trundling through the meadows.
First prize for prettiness goes to Haute Seille, an area of the Jura that’s famed for its towering crags and plunging valleys. It’s also famous for two unique local products – comté cheese and vin jaune, a barrel-aged wine that tastes unlike anything else on Earth.
Cheese and wine are served morning, noon and night. After munching our way through a breakfast of old comté, we found ourselves eating it again at Maison du Comté, a museum-cum-tasting house where you’re taught how to appreciate it properly. Lunch was a comté salad (with vin jaune) and evening drinks came with yet more comté. ‘You must drink vin jaune whenever you eat comté,’ says Helene Berthet-Baudet, whose family domain produces some of the finest wines in the area.
Vin jaune is made in a peculiar way. The barrelled wine slowly evaporates, creating an air gap between the wine and the wood. The film of yeast that forms on the surface is left for several years in order for the flavour to impregnate the wine. ‘What can you taste?’ asks Helene as I swill another glass. ‘Sherry. Hay. Old barns.’ She nods and tells me it’ll keep for more than a century. I assure her that the bottle I’ve just bought won’t last more than a week.
Some of Haute Seille’s villages are picture-postcard perfect. One of the finest is Chateau Chalon, a 12th Century jewel that’s straddled across an enormous bluff of limestone. This was the birthplace of vin jaune and it owes its current prosperity to the wine. (At €30 a bottle, the winemakers are on to a good thing.)
There’s a sprinkling of good restaurants, a panorama to die for, and cheese outlets for those who haven’t yet eaten their fill.
As we left Chateau Chalon, we decided we’d just visited the most beautiful village in France. But then
we stumbled across one that was even better. Baume les Messieurs is situated in one of Haute Seille’s so-called ‘blind valleys’. These geological cul-de-sacs have been formed by millennia of water erosion that’s eaten away at the limestone before plunging deep underground.
AT BAUME l es Messieurs, the local river has gashed a vast gorge into the rock, leaving spectacular cliff-faces and a natural amphitheatre. Inside the amphitheatre sits the medieval village of Baume.
Today it’s a sleepy place where the inhabitants seem to idle away their days in the warm sunshine, but it was a different story in the Middle Ages. Baume les Messieurs then housed one of the great monasteries of Western Europe, a powerful community under the direct protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa.
The abbey was abandoned after the French Revolution, when its buildings were colonised by villagers. They made their dwellings inside the cloisters, chapter house and refectory.
These days you can wander through the various courtyards and poke your head inside the buildings, some of which serve as museums.
A 30-minute hike up the valley will bring you to a series of spectacular mini-waterfalls that drip through a sodden curtain of ferns and moss. Ramblers cool their feet in the glacial water and cast nervous glances upwards. It’s a long, long way to the top of the blind valley.
Many of Haute Seille’s finest attractions come without any publicity. We were driving through the village of Frontenac when we stumbled across a 12th Century fortress perched atop yet another limestone bluff.
Although it’s privately owned, the owners have kindly thrown open the gardens and terraces to the public. As we wander about, the imposing chatelaine rings a bell to call in the grandchildren for lunch.
It’s an idyllic spot. ‘The sort of chateau that you could really imagine living in,’ sighs Mrs Milton.
Just a few miles away is Cascades du Herisson, a series of more than 30 waterfalls and torrents that are slowly scouring their way through the landscape. Come back in a million years and they will have formed another blind valley.
Water, you soon discover, has long been crucial to the life of the Jura, and never more so than at Arc-et-Senans, one of the most bizarre factories in the world. In the late 18th Century, the eccentric architect Claude Ledoux was given a royal commission to build a salt-works. Its purpose was simple: to extract salt from saline water by evaporating it.
But Ledoux took a rather more idiosyncratic approach. As well as furnaces and storage tanks, he also fashioned a classically inspired palace. He wanted his factory to be a work of absolute symmetry. Built in the shape of a vast semi-circle, it has columns and porticos that look as if they’ve been filched from a Greek temple.
It’s impossible to realise the scale of the place until you step inside the main building, whose ceiling span is so high and large that you could fit a cathedral inside.
After a hard day’s sightseeing, we headed for the provincial town of Arbois to sample the very best of local fare at Les Arcades, an unpretentious restaurant in the town centre.
This is the place to come if you want to try the region’s greatest speciality, local Bourg-en-Bresse chicken cooked in vin jaune sauce and served with wild morels that are dripping with cream and butter.
‘Would monsieur care for some comté afterwards?’ asks the waitress as I struggle through the final mouthful. For the first time since arriving in the Jura, I have to say no. ‘Or another glass of wine, perhaps?’ You won’t lose weight on a trip to this region. But acquiring those extra pounds will be a truly pleasurable experience.