Switched Off in the Languedoc

It wasn’t on the itinerary. It wasn’t even on the map, really. Then England did its April thing, and a wine estate ten minutes from Montpellier airport quietly fixed my entire weekend and reset me completely.

So. We weren’t supposed to be here at all.

There’d been a plan a lovely drive to the Wales for the weekend in April, a fabulous British spring countryside break was planned, enjoying glorious nature walks and spring flowers, the sort you talk yourself into and then spend squinting at the sky hoping to see a blue patches between the grey clouds. But the forecast came back as a flat sheet of drizzle with the cheerful little promise of “brighter spells later,” which is weather’s way of telling you to manage your expectations, and somewhere over the second cup of tea on Friday morning, we cracked. Booked a flight with the recklessness of people who’ve simply needed some serious R & R. And by mid-afternoon I was flat out by a pool with something my green juice under the brightest bright blue sky with not a cloud in sight and a balmy 25c. unusually warm for that time of year but perfect to help us truly switch off and unwind.

Here’s the bit nobody tell you about Domaine de Verchant: it’s just a 10 min drive from the airport, but fortunately you don’t see or hear a plane during the stay. So door to door we were there in a very comfortable four hours from Gatwick.

A folly with very good bones

Some hotels invent a backstory. Verchant has the real one, and it’s a long one. The estate got handed over by the Bishop of Montpellier to a man called Pierre Verchant way back in 1582 and it kept his name through nearly two centuries in the family. Then in 1878 a wine merchant named Jules Leenhardt bought it, half for love and half because phylloxera was busy wiping out the vineyards of Europe and somebody had to do something about it. He even dragged in the Bühler brothers, the famous Swiss landscape architects, to fuss over the grounds. The house itself winks at the old folies –  those pleasure-places the Montpellier gentry built purely to do nothing, beautifully. Which, honestly, turns out to be the whole point of the visit.

The current owners, Chantal and Pierre Mestre, took it on in 2002 and then spent the best part of seven years putting it back together – and its insanely beautifully. The original blonde-stone château – vaulted ceilings, old mosaics, next to the most stunning architectural juxtaposition of the sleek modern wing that’s all light and clean lines and floor to ceiling glass windows. You can sleep in either. The old rooms come loaded with character; the new ones go for a kind of pared-back hush. Both are quietly full of the good Italian stuff (Poltrona Frau, a bit of Patricia Urquiola, the odd Flos lamp throwing light through the room). It’s all just been thought about by someone who clearly lies awake worrying about these things so you don’t have to.

Mornings, in no rush whatsoever

I loved mornings waking up opening the shutters to see the clearest blue skies and views of the aqua pool at the front of the hotel. I enjoyed morning walks through the vineyards – sixteen hectares of them, farmed organically on a stretch of rolled-pebble terroir called La Méjanelle. Then a potter through the kitchen garden – ‘le potager’ to see what’s come up overnight. (Small detail I loved: the produce gets ferried in from the garden by tricycle. And they even have an honestly shop for locals to come and enjoy their produce).

Breakfast isn’t a meal so much as a ritual you’d be daft to rush. Local jams. A spread of fruit and berries that takes the seasons seriously. And the bread – walnut, rye, dense and deep and impossible to choose between, so you don’t: you take one of each, because the French treat carbs as a point of national pride and it would be rude not to join in and then a cheese board broad enough to be a meal in itself, from the polite to the properly stinky, tempting you off the rails before nine in the morning. And then eggs however you ask for them; mine, every time, a veg omelette with mushrooms. And the coffee – look, I’m not a second-cup person but it was sublime so I had a second cup.

The fine art of barely lifting a finger

Days drift between moving and not moving, and the place makes both stupidly easy. The spa’s been expanded recently and you can tell, it’s really lush, and big without being clinical, with a huge social sauna and steam rooms that open straight onto the grounds, again with floor to ceiling glass windows, a cold plunge for the brave (or the smug), and a couples’ massage I’d genuinely have signed a longer lease on, the therapists were seriously good. They have three pools on the estate including a heated indoor pool with seriously fierce jets to pummel any tension out of your shoulders. Even the changing rooms are spacious and stylish with every locker filled with waffled robes, new flip flops, combs and shower caps.

And if you feel the need to earn the pastry, there’s a shiny new gym kitted out in Technogym, plus a daily timetable that somehow makes exercise feel like a choice rather than a punishment – yoga first thing, reformer Pilates, something more intense like boxercise in the afternoon if you’re feeling it. (They also do longer multi-day reset programmes, the serious longevity kind, if three days of softening the edges leaves you wanting the full overhaul.)

Now let’s get onto the food. The two restaurants walk the line between nourishing and indulgent without wobbling. Marcelle, the gastronomic one, sits in the contemporary wing – a light-filled room built around a single olive tree, with a terrace that spills out over the grounds – and you pick between a four- or six-course tasting menu, much of it grown a few steps away in the estate’s own gardens. Quietly clever, precise, every plate composed rather than constructed; and so pretty. The wellness menu is the lighter counterpoint, bright and in step with the pace of the place. Not one dud in three days, I felt truly nourished but not overly stuffed or overfed after the three days.

And wine runs through all of it. Tastings go well past the estate’s own bottles – three reds, a rosé the exact colour of a petal, a white – and the cellar reads like a roll call of labels you’d recognise across a crowded room. You can enjoy a range of wine tasting experiences both at the hotel and at nearby vineyards too.

The sea, and then the city

Fifteen minutes south and the land flattens out into the Mediterranean – long, empty ribbons of sand where we walked for miles and only stopped to enjoy the freshest seafood lunch of oysters, moules marinière and sea bass. Absolute heaven.

And come evening, Montpellier, a city that’s spent years being quietly overlooked in favour of its flashier Provençal neighbours, and is all the better for it. The old town, L’Écusson (named after its little shield shape), is a tangle of medieval lanes that keep opening, with no warning, onto great stone squares. There’s Place de la Comédie, the big oval everyone calls l’œuf, the egg, with the Fountain of the Three Graces in the middle and café terraces built for losing entire hours. There’s Place de la Canourgue, the oldest and prettiest, all hackberry trees and a fountain topped with unicorns. Even the trams are showing off: the city got Christian Lacroix to design two of the lines, so you end up rattling past sea monsters and jewels on the way to dinner.

We did all the things you should do. Coffee on one square, an apéritif on the next, and eventually a table under the stars to enjoy the menu du jour. It’s a throbbing young vibrant city and so good to see the streets enjoy shops stuffed with amazing products and no empty shops.

Three days was perfect!

Three days was perfect a total reset.  Long enough to reset, to soften, to remember what it actually feels like to switch off properly, that quietly ridiculous mix of sunshine, movement and sun and seriously good food and sea air. Utterly perfection.

Montpellier might be having its moment. But at Verchant, time just keeps its own counsel – slow, generous, exactly enough to remind you why you came.

If what you’re after is restorative break rather than just escape, this is where you go.

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