The 450 volcanoes of the Auvergne sleep softly, their peaks covered in grass and sometimes streaked with snow. Between them are valleys filled with green pasture, gentian meadows, and pine forests. This part of central France has a gentle landscape—“a rambler’s paradise,” my guidebook tells me—but everything taken from it bears a trace of ancient fire: the raw milk cheeses of Saint-Nectaire; the finely marbled beef of Salers cattle; the peppery, iridescent lentils of Puy; even the smoke-black cathedral of Notre Dame in Clermont-Ferrand, the regional capital, which was carved out of a local lava stone. Yet nothing expresses the Auvergne’s volcanic inheritance better than the natural wines now being made here, on hillsides and in quiet villages where grapes haven’t been cultivated in generations.
The ideal place to taste the wines of the Auvergne is Le Saint-Eutrope, an unassuming corner bistro in Clermont-Ferrand which opened in 2013 and was named the best bistro in France two years later by the Parisian dining bible Le Fooding. Like a number of young restaurants in this region, it is run by an Englishman, Harry Lester, a veteran of London gastropubs who has dedicated himself to earthy French cooking. A typical chalk-scrawled menu might include a house-made terrine of venison and wild boar; deep green asparagus, served with its flowers and custardy hollandaise; slow-roasted baby goat, in a light broth flecked with parsley and a few niçoise olives; and a hunk of knobbly blue cheese that makes you want to renounce your citizenship.
And then there’s the wine. My wife, Yana, and I decided to take a road trip across the Auvergne after drinking a few unbelievably delicious glasses of Auvergnat wine at natural wine hotspots like Aux Deux Amis and Le Verre Volé in Paris. The first bottle we have at Saint-Europe is from Marie and Vincent Tricot—a gamay that drops us right into the countryside with flavors of crushed berries and wild flowers, and a far-off, not unpleasant whiff of cow manure. You can’t get much more local than this, since the wine is made just outside Clermont, near the medieval village of Orcet, in a 100-acre vineyard surrounded by light woods and hay fields.
“Everything you see here was once covered in vines,” Vincent Tricot tells us when we pay him a visit after lunch. “Back in the 19th century, Auvergne was the third-largest wine producing region in France.” But then came the devastating blight of phylloxera in the 1860s, followed eventually by World War I and the arrival of heavy industry spearheaded by the Michelin tire company, based nearby in Clermont. Within a couple generations, the Auvergne’s winemakers became factory workers.
Tricot and his wife settled here in 2003, part of a small group of natural vignerons who are recapturing the lost winemaking tradition of the area. They don't belong to a nationally sanctioned “appellation”—which means they are free to make wine as they please. They farm organically and, like most natural winemakers, forsake additives, harvesting often by hand, and fermenting with indigenous yeasts. Tricot specializes in gamay d’auvergne, a local varietal that is slightly darker in color and more tannic than the gamays from Beaujolais. He pours me a glass of the latest vintage, made using a method called carbonic maceration, where the uncrushed grapes are fermented whole, producing a lively, zippy wine. This one releases a gentle sparkle—or “pearl,” as the French say.
Another important winemaker in this area is Patrick Bouju, whose ancient vines (up to 120 years old) are planted so narrowly that he has to plow his fields with a draft horse. Bouju is an experimentalist who has gotten noticed for his eclectic blends, including one bottling made in collaboration with the Falstaffian rapper and travel host Action Bronson. Bouju, the Tricots, Jean Maupertuis and other veterans of the region have been joined in recent years by younger, even more fanatical winemakers, like François Dhumes, Aurélien Lefort, and the Japanese transplant Mito Inoue. The cult status of these indie winemakers owes as much to the quality of their juice as to the tiny quantity they produce: as little as a single barrel each year.
For a sundowner, we take one of Lefort’s wines, a mix of gamay and pinot noir oozing dark fruit, back to our hotel, Le Bois Basalte in nearby Manzat. It is a high-design campground set in an old basalt quarry. The brainchild of four young architects, this eco-friendly complex links together eight modern cabins (lofted bed, panoramic windows, wood-fired stove) along a winding wood-slat path. A beautiful communal area, with a knockout view of the volcanoes, is cantilevered over a disused rail trestle. The best part is the sauna, which the architects have cleverly set in a stone ruin—an essential ritual of purification before another day of serious drinking.
If you tell Parisians that you are traveling to the Auvergne to visit vineyards, they will look puzzled. “This is where we go camping, not wine-tasting” one Frenchman tells me. Located due west of Burgundy, smack in the center of the country, the Auvergne is among the most rural parts of France. Proud history and natural beauty have always been abundant in the Auvergne; material wealth has not. Poverty forced successive generations to seek a better life elsewhere. When the railroad arrived in the 19th century, millions fled to Paris, where they typically sold coal and wood out of cheap corner stores called bougnats. Each had a little zinc bar on which the more enterprising proprietors served coffee or a plate of food. Over time, these operations morphed into sophisticated cafés. By the 1940s, according to the food historian Peter Graham, Auvergnats ran the majority of the cafés in Paris, including some celebrated ones, like the Café de Flore.
It is easy to find places here that look like the kinds of hardscrabble villages the Auvergnats left behind. Driving south from Clermont-Ferrand, the landscape of volcanoes flattens out into rolling pine forests. In the small village of Rilhac, located in the Haute-Loire department, there are no people, just dirty geese waddling along a muddy street lined with crumbling barns. One can romanticize this paysage rustique, but the village is also emblematic of the decay and deathly silence that now fills swaths of provincial France.
For better or worse, tourism represents one of the few countervailing forces against this trend. That’s true in Rilhac, where an abandoned two-room schoolhouse has been transformed into a “bistronomy”-style restaurant called La Petite École. The dining room is tricked out with antique school supplies, but the only lesson here is how to cook perfect modern French cuisine. One dish, roast lamb in an onyx slick of cuttlefish ink, is so racy and delicious I mop up every bit of sauce with bread until my plate is streaked in black, like a painting by Pierre Soulages.
The espressos we have with dessert are no match for the postprandial daze that settles over us as we drive the winding road to the Auberge de Chassignolles: a barebones 1930s country inn surrounded by red pines in the hilltop village of Chassignolles. Every natural wino who visits the Auvergne makes a stop at this covert temple to the good life. With a gentian-spiked Negroni, you quickly slip into the atmosphere of laidback bonhomie on the broad terrace overlooking a 12th-century church. The scene here is a mix of local and expat Londoners—a filmmaker, a restaurateur, and other creative types who have second homes in the village.
Inside, the library overflows with culinary books. Guest rooms are simple: white tile floors, wooden armoires, crisp linen. The generous, soft-spoken owner, Peter Taylor, invites a talented young chef every summer from Paris, London, or Melbourne to take over the kitchen. On our visit it is Oslo-born Thomas Haugstvedt, who had previously cooked at Le Verre Volé and the Norwegian embassy in Paris. Tonight’s menu includes gougères with a pine needle-infused cream, white asparagus, and roast guinea fowl. Everything comes family style on antique china, and the savory courses end with a superb local cheese plate.
In the morning we drive east into the Cantal, which is not only the emptiest part of the Auvergne, it’s the least populated département in all of France. As we gain altitude, the forest gives way to snow-covered volcanoes and sinewy valleys dug out by glaciers that formed after lava flows. The grass here looks good enough to eat—and indeed there are bushy, red Salers cattle masticating everywhere. Even in this remote cow country, the Auvergne’s new gastronomic energy is present. Chris Wright, another Briton who ran the celebrated neighborhood bistro Le Timbre in Paris, has taken over an old grocery in the tiny village of Dienne (population: 271). He cooks a three-course menu for 23 euros: country terrines, beef slowly braised in wine, a perfect tarte tatin, bottles by Bouju and Tricot. In 2017, Wright’s restaurant, L’Epicerie de Dienne, was named the best village bistro in France by Le Fooding.
We are spending our last night in the Auvergne at Alta Terra, a 1920s chalet located at the bottom of one of the most picturesque, snow-streaked volcanoes, the Puy Mary. It’s owned by a young couple, Stéphane and Virginie Serre, who thoughtfully renovated the property themselves, adding a hammam and an outdoor wooden hot tub. Enthusiasm for natural wine extends even to the alpine reaches of the Auvergne. Before dinner, Stéphane pours me a glass of amber-colored chardonnay made in the Cantal (Badoulin by Stéphane Elzière) that smells like hay and apple cider.
Alta Terra serves a simple meal every night, alternating between vegetarian fare and the region’s hearty classics: lentils, fresh pork sausages (from a nearby organic farm) and especially truffade—a griddled mixture of young Cantal cheese, garlic, duck fat, and potatoes. A dozen guests gather at a long table in the inn’s one large public room, a wide window framing the volcanoes. This dinner is an elaboration on the Auvergnat concept of the veillée, a friendly gathering where peasants used to crack walnuts, husk maize, and warm the cockles with a few swigs of eau de vie, which Stéphane sets on the table after dessert.
Before sunrise, we’re awoken by loud cowbells. We try to make the best of it, staggering out to the terrace to watch the frost disappear and the sun come up over the mottled green valley. Virginie has already made coffee. Breakfast is a parade of dairy: cheese, cultured butter, yogurt—all homemade or from neighboring farms, served with grainy breads and an unexpectedly delicious jam made from Puy lentils.
Afterward, we follow the sound of cowbells down a dirt road and into the valley. There are no people, only a few feather-hoofed horses and lots of red Salers cattle who look at us quizzically, twisting their heads through a wire fence. The ground at the bottom of the valley feels unexpectedly bouncy, and the volcanoes of the Cantal are bordering us on both sides. I am trying, as I often do, to dress up the last few days of indulgence in some kind of meaning, to see if our journey added up to something more than a few great meals and few great bottles of wine. I think, if it did, then it had something to do with understanding that hokey, mystical French concept of terroir; how it’s not just a fancy word for earth but the weird alchemy by which nature, culture, and history merge into something that you can taste. And in the Auvergne, I’ve learned, it tastes pretty close to perfect.
