The Rhône vineyard runs for some 200 kilometres from Vienne, just south of Lyon, to Avignon, and it is really two regions that share a river. In the north the valley is a granite gorge and the vineyards are terraced on slopes too steep for machinery: Côte-Rôtie, Hermitage, Cornas and Saint-Joseph for Syrah, Condrieu and Château-Grillet for Viognier, all of them small and all of them worked by hand.

South of the Montélimar gap the valley opens out, the climate turns Mediterranean and the mistral takes over. Here Grenache leads blends of up to a dozen varieties on the rounded stones of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the sandy slopes of Gigondas and the terraces of Tavel and Lirac. The papal court at Avignon in the fourteenth century made the reputation of the southern vineyards, and Châteauneuf, where the first French appellation rules were drafted in the 1920s, gave the whole country its system.