Champagne, Burgundy, and the France no ship reaches

A great deal of France's most celebrated wine is made in places a cruise passenger will never see, for the straightforward reason that none of it is anywhere near the sea. Champagne is made around Reims and Épernay, a hundred and thirty kilometres inland from the Channel coast. Burgundy runs south from Dijon along a narrow limestone ridge nowhere near a navigable river of any size. Getting to either requires leaving the water altogether, which is precisely what a handful of escorted coach tours are built to do.

The monk, the myth and the method

Champagne's association with a Benedictine monk named Dom Pérignon, cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvillers near Épernay in the late seventeenth century, is one of the more persistent stories in French wine, and one of the least accurate in its most famous form. Dom Pérignon did not invent sparkling wine, and the story of him crying out to his fellow monks that he was drinking stars appears to have been invented long after his death; what he did do was refine techniques for blending grapes from different vineyards and for using stronger glass and better corks to control a wine that, at the time, tended to develop bubbles unpredictably and sometimes explosively in the bottle. The region's chalky soil, a legacy of an ancient seabed, and its northerly, marginal climate turned out to be well suited to exactly the kind of high-acid base wine the Champagne method needs, and Reims Cathedral, where the kings of France were traditionally crowned for close to a thousand years, still stands at the heart of the region that eventually made the country's most exported luxury.

Burgundy, measured in individual fields

Burgundy takes the opposite approach to scale. Rather than one large appellation, the region divides its best vineyards into hundreds of individually named plots, some no larger than a football pitch, each capable of producing wine that tastes measurably different from the field next door, largely on account of subtle variations in the limestone and clay beneath the surface. The Route des Grands Crus runs the length of this narrow strip south from Dijon through Beaune, historically the region's wine-trading capital and home to the Hôtel-Dieu, a fifteenth-century hospital for the poor whose glazed, geometrically patterned roof tiles have become one of the most photographed pieces of architecture in Burgundy, built and endowed by a chancellor of the Duchy of Burgundy as an act of penance and public charity in roughly equal measure.

Avignon, and the wine that grew up around a papal palace

Further south, the Rhône valley offers a different kind of inland wine country, one shaped less by monks and merchants than by a fourteenth-century argument about where the pope should live. Between 1309 and 1377, seven successive popes governed the Catholic Church not from Rome but from Avignon, a period later dubbed the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy by critics who considered it both a scandal and an exile. The immense fortress-palace they built, the Palais des Papes, still dominates the town, and the vineyards that grew up around it to supply the papal court, most famously at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a village whose name translates simply as the pope's new castle, remain some of the most respected in the southern Rhône.

Reaching the vineyards

Travelsphere's A Toast to France, seven nights, covers both Champagne and Burgundy on a single coach itinerary, taking in Reims, Épernay, Dijon and Beaune with cellar visits built into the route.

Just You's Cruising the Rhône & Picturesque Provence, solo-friendly throughout, approaches the southern vineyards by river instead, sailing between Lyon and Avignon with stops at Viviers and Arles along the way, while Explore Worldwide's Taste of Southern France pairs Bordeaux's wine trade with the fortified hill towns of the Dordogne and the walls of Carcassonne further south.

None of these routes involves a ship, which is rather the point: the vineyards that built France's reputation for wine were, almost without exception, planted with no thought at all for where a boat might one day be able to stop.