"When you’re born in Provence, it’s hopeless – nothing else is good enough."
- Paul Cézanne, French impressionist and painter
It is said that the colors in Provence are unlike any on Earth. They tease and challenge the senses. Aromas, textures, and sounds all provide such deep inspiration that it is no wonder poets and painters like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne flocked here to nurture their souls.
Provence is an eden.
Situated in southern France, it stretches from the Rhône River in the west to the Italian border in the east, with the Mediterranean Sea lapping at its southern edges and the foothills of the Alps rising to the north. It encompasses storied cities like Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, and Avignon, as well as the lavender fields of the Luberon and the ochre cliffs of Roussillon. This is a land of contrast—where the Mistral wind carves through ancient olive groves, where mountain villages perch precariously over deep gorges, and where the sun bleaches stone farmhouses golden.
The history of this place is rooted in its fertile soils. The Western record begins at around 600 BC, with a “love story,” and a cup of wine. After Greek Phocaeans landed here, the leader of the local Ségobriges tribe invited the settlers to a banquet, where his daughter offered the Phocaean leader, Protis, a cup of wine to show her intentions to marry him.
Nearly five centuries later, the Romans arrived to find a sun-baked landscape marked by the spindles of cyprus trees, vines, olive groves, and fertile crops of every sort.
Provence was the first Roman province established outside of Italy, and quickly became a significant trading partner for its production of wine and olive oil. The name, “Provence,” derives from the Roman name for the region, “Provincia,” or “the Province,” showing its primacy among Rome’s outposts.
Some historians estimate that in 50 BC, one Roman villa here, the Pardigon, produced more than 1000 hectoliters of wine, or more than 130,000 bottles by today’s measure, each vintage. To export the wine, merchants would float large bronze kraters, amphora, and casks full of fermented grape juice on the river to Bandol’s shallow ports, where ships would fish them out and ship them to the motherland and farther afield.
And yet, the great cultural influence of Provence begins and expands after the time of the Romans, among the dukes, counts, queens, and kings of the High Middle Ages. Between Provence and Northern Spain, in a region known as Occitan, Troubadours rhapsodized on the beauty of the natural world, the unfair strictures of the court, and most of all, love, using their poetry and accompanying music to impress and entertain their courts and to perhaps woo a local countess.
These were some of the first literary works written in the local vernacular, and not in Latin. Their language, Occitan, or Provençal, was more well-suited to express the swelling emotions and the flights of fancy of these rambunctious performances, telling a tale of how an otherwise-unworthy Troubadour might elevate themselves to match an angelic spouse of higher social standing.
An old Provençal poem:
“I will never believe, whoever may swear it,
that wine doesn't come from grapes
and that men don't improve through love”
- Marcabru
The language of Provençal still survives in parts of Provence, spoken mostly by older generations in the countryside and in limited phrases slipped in among the usual French. Its survival almost mirrors that of Catalan, with which it shares the root language of Occitan, along with an accompanying political movement centered around self-determination. One of the key figures in the survival and promotion of the native tongue was Nobel Prize-winning poet and philologist, Fredéric Mistral, that wrote in, and promoted Provençal. His deliciously titled journal, l’Aoili, was published thrice monthly for over 100 months, and published exclusively in Provençal.
For a place so unconcerned with the passage of time, with anything besides those things that make life good, it’s both surprising and not that there is a real protectionism around the way of life here. But, then again, it is so different, so distinctly itself, and so basically sweet and harmonious. The same Fred Mistral wrote, “Eici, tout resplendi, tout canta: la terro, lou soulèu, lou vent,” or in English, “Here, everything shines, everything sings: the earth, the sun, the wind.”
It’s hard to find a description of Provence that isn’t buoyed by a little poetic air, and impossible to find one that isn’t filled with admiration. In his book, A Year in Provence, British writer Peter Mayle recounts the simultaneously ineffable ease and intense vibrancy of daily life here, “The smell of lavender drifted through the open kitchen window, mingling with the garlic sizzling in olive oil, an aroma that belonged entirely to this place and no other."
But it was perhaps the color of the place that struck Gayle most: “The Provençal sun does strange things to colors: the greens are greener, the browns browner, the whites almost blinding in their intensity.” Here, Van Gogh stroked some of his most colorful and intense works, including the series of Sunflowers, which bloom abundantly around the small city of Arles, where he took up residence with Paul Gaugin. A residence immortalized in, The Yellow House, just a year before he seized the luminous stars, whipping winds, and stately Cypruses, and committed them to canvas in, Starry Night.
Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, and meditated on the landscape countless times, "When you’re born there, it’s hopeless, nothing else is good enough." His some eighty paintings of Mount Saint-Victoire offer just as many glances inside the prismatic day-to-day. "There is something about the light here that makes even the most ordinary things—a wall, a chair, a loaf of bread—seem touched by art," writes Mayle.
Life is built on these daily, solar inspirations. In the harbors and ports that dot the Mediterranean coast, pastel-painted ships called Pointu bob listlessly in waiting for their fisherman. The churchbells don’t ring out on the hour, but rather at the setting of the sun. And the food is decidedly untouched by the Haute Cuisine of Lyon and Paris, retaining olive oil for butter, and bringing their unique glut of summer produce and seafood to the table, without the mediation of too much cream or sauce. Garlic and the proudly local l’aoili are ever-present.
"To the Provençal, time is not money. Time is time, to be spent in the shade of a plane tree, a glass in hand, a friend beside you," writes Mayle. It’s no wonder that Provence’s greatest export is both a wine and a color - a shade of life here to aspire to no matter where a great bottle of rosé happens to be uncorked. After all, as Mistral writes, “the bee makes no sweeter honey than our wine.”
This week only, enjoy a Summer in Provence through our first-ever Provence Rosé Membership. Our launch feature is the 2025 Alpilles Rosé, from Domaine de Métifiot, pictured above.
