Ah, Provence

Just returned from a week in lovely Provence -- our first visit. We stayed with another couple in a three-unit house just east of Avignon near Carpentras. I just uploaded our photos to Smugmug, my preferred method for storing and sharing photos online.  If you've not tried it, I highly recommend. It stores your whole photo at full resolution and not just a portion. It also creates a URL for all of your albums (galleries), making it very easy to share them without sending your friends one of those obnoxious invites.

We had a car, so we spent all of our time driving around the countryside visiting the little villages and taking in the local culture. We did some wineries, but only a few. Our favourite was Domaine de Mourchon at Sugeret. We had an excellent tasting there and ate out lunch under a grape arbor in the front of the tasting room while being entertained by the vineyard dog Rudy (see photos). 

I was impressed by the quality of the wine and how inexpensive it was. We drank a lot of wine during the week and most of it was priced under 10 Euros. We discovered Provence roses. My previous brushed with rose wine hasn't been good. Because it's relatively high in sugar, it tends to give me a headache. The fine Provence roses were different and we loved them.

It's not hard to see why France is the largest wine producing region in the world, more than twice the production of the US. Everywhere we drove, the ground was covered with vines. There are 14 varietals they are allowed to grow in Provence, but most of the wine is grenache and shiraz. We did have some excellent viogniers, though. 

One of the fun things we did was got to St. Remy to watch the annual (every may 12) running of the sheep when the sheep are moved from the low land to the mountains. It's quite a festival day in St. Remy and brings out many locals. We also had a delightful day in Roussillon, a quaint little village in the ocra hills east of Avignon. 

It was a very restful week. We cooked most of our meals, buying our meat in local butcher shops or the hyper marche in Carpentras. We definitely felt the impact of the strong Euro, but the price of the local wine helped temper that.