Toul: The Flamboyant Façade and the Great Gothic Cloister

Required Activities

• Stand back from the west front, finished in 1497, and count the empty niches on the three portals: the statues in them were all taken out by municipal order in January 1794, and some of the survivors are in the Musée de Toul. Then find the odd thing on the skyline between the two Gothic towers — the Renaissance campanile of 1534, with its colonnade, Corinthian capitals, round arches and dome

• Walk all three galleries of the cloister, counting the bays as you go — ten on the 65 m east walk, six on the 40 m south, eight on the 52 m west — and work out why there is no fourth: the cathedral nave closes the square. Look up at the gutters feeding the gargoyles, the piece of medieval plumbing Viollet-le-Duc came here to study

• At Saint-Gengoult, look at the thirteenth-century glass still in the choir, then step into the little cloister of 1510 to 1530 and find where it stops: it was designed for two storeys and the upper one was never built, leaving flamboyant vaults inside and Renaissance detail outside

• Taste a gris de Toul, half the appellation's output, and hold it up to the light for the salmon-orange colour: it is made by pressing black-skinned pinot noir and gamay straight off and fermenting the juice as a white wine, a method that applied to gamay is used nowhere else in the world

• Drive the vineyard edge west of the town through Bruley, Lucey and Domgermain, on the south and south-east facing slopes of the cuesta, and ask a grower which two thirds of this small 75-hectare appellation are now farmed organically