Why this ‘unfashionable’ season is the best time to visit the south of France

In late autumn in France, the light starts closing in and the weather cools. Among its stylish citizenry, coats are dug out and collars shrugged around necks as Christmas shopping begins in the boutiques.

It’s not every sun-loving Aussie’s idea of a good time for a holiday. But if you ever need a reason (or six) to take the date less travelled, talk to Elise Losfelt – the third generation female chief winemaker at Chateau de l’Engarran, just outside the southern regional town of Montpellier.

Her historic vineyard – whose glorious decorated “folie”, or manor house, was recently used in the remake of the film The Count of Monte Cristo – reveals that autumn is the best time of all. “Just look at the colours of the trees,” Losfelt enthuses, pointing out the reds and oranges of the surrounding forest. “You can talk to the vigneron about how the harvest went. You can’t do that in summer; they don’t know yet. Also, they don’t have time to talk to you.”

I’m in Montpellier courtesy of Qantas, which last year signed a new deal with Air France allowing Australians to check straight through to dozens of French towns on the local carrier. It turns out this relatively unknown city – France’s seventh largest – is a quiet, historic place that, during our visit, is shining under a bright blue sky, the fountains playing, with a pleasant crispness to the autumn air.

If you know nothing about Montpellier (I didn’t), it pays to start with a half-day walking tour, booked through the local tourist agency. Our guide, the knowledgeable Manon from the tourist office, literally has the keys to the city.

She takes our group inside the medical school – the oldest still working in Europe – to show us where hundreds of years of graduates have stood to defend their theses. The centuries of (male) doctors depicted in portraits on these walls were among those who helped resolve an entrenched, 18th-century dispute between doctors and surgeons, and who invented and propagated the theory of “Montpellier vitalism”.

Back in Paris, the city has its autumn clothes on. There is a bit of rain and temperatures of 15 degrees – no colder than Melbourne’s dismal 2025 spring.

MICHAEL BACHELARD

Manon takes us to a busy boulangerie, whose bakers demonstrate how to use a flame thrower to heat the 200-year-old oven. She unlocks one door to the top of the town’s Arc de Triumph, and another to take us down, five metres under the street, into a mikveh – a Jewish ceremonial bath, whose constantly replenishing waters survived the purging of the Jews from France in the 14th century.

Montpellier is close to the Mediterranean, the mountains and the countryside. Its 18th-century architecture mirrors that of Paris. From my window in the Hôtel Richer de Belleval – a former castle in the centre of town – I look out from my cavernous room to a lively bar in a garden-filled square, where students drink and chat late into the night as people walk past with their dogs.

Back in Paris, the city has its autumn clothes on. There is a bit of rain and temperatures of 15 degrees – no colder than Melbourne’s dismal 2025 spring.

To my eye, Paris looks good in the rain. And it’s quiet. The bulk of the tourists are biding their time until the next summer, so there are no queues at the brasseries or to get into the rooftop at the fabulous Galleries Lafayette department store.

The highlight, though, is a two-hour workshop at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, which has opened a campus on the Place de la Concorde at the renovated Hôtel de la Marine – itself well worth a tour.

Here, with considerable help from chef, we make foie gras ravioli and mushroom broth foam – then eat it. The workshops, for a reasonable price, allow ordinary punters a taste – get it? – of creating haute cuisine.

From mid-November, Paris’s Christmas lights switch on, and the shopping centres are bedecked with decorations as people prepare for the coming solstice. Inside, there’s a spritz, steak frites and a wood fire.

It may not fill your Insta feed with picnics by the Seine, but France in autumn is quite capable of filling both your senses and your soul.

The writer travelled to France courtesy of Qantas.

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