Roquetaillade, Sauternes and Bazas: Viollet-le-Duc's Castle, the Noble Rot and a Pilgrim Cathedral

Required Activities

• On the guided round of Roquetaillade's apartments — the only place in France where Viollet-le-Duc did the lot, building, decoration, furniture and household arrangements together — hunt out the creatures of his painted bestiary on walls and ceilings, and pick a piece of furniture he designed himself; it was his pupil Edmond Duthoit who carried the work out on site

• Taste at the Maison du Sauternes on the village square, where the eighty growers of the appellation pour side by side, and ask to be shown two bottles from different châteaux of the same year — then go and stand on the bank of the Ciron, whose cold water running under the Landes forest makes the autumn morning mists that rot the grapes in the first place

• Work along the three mid-13th-century portals at Bazas, which survive only because the townspeople paid ten thousand écus to stop the Calvinists pulling the front down with the rest of the cathedral: count your way up the eighty little figures in the arches of the central Last Judgement, then on the south door find the labours of the months paired off against the signs of the zodiac

• Walk the enclosure at Roquetaillade out to the stump of the vieux château, whose stonework goes back to the 10th century and which had no well — the reason the second castle was built — then go into the chapelle Saint-Michel, the last building of the village that once stood inside these walls, and look up at the Moorish coffered ceiling Viollet-le-Duc put in it