Bergerac

I came to Bergerac for the wine, which is probably the honest reason most people come, even if they frame it as the old town or the Cyrano de Bergerac mythology. The old town is genuinely nice — half-timbered medieval buildings, a riverside quarter called the Cloître des Récollets where a former monastery now houses the regional wine trade offices and a barrel-vaulted wine cellar open for tastings. The Cyrano mythology is largely fictional: Edmond Rostand named his fictional character after the real seventeenth-century writer Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, who was from Paris, not Bergerac at all. There is a statue. The town appears to have made peace with the confusion.

The wine, though, is the real thing. The Bergerac appellation covers a range of styles — dry whites from Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon, reds from Cabernet and Merlot blends, rosés — and the quality, particularly at the domain level, consistently outperforms the price point. The sweet wine from Monbazillac, the village on the hill seven kilometers south, is what first brought Bergerac to the attention of Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century, and the Monbazillac AOC still produces a botrytis-affected dessert wine with the depth and complexity of a good Sauternes at half the price. I sat on the terrace of a domain above the Monbazillac vines with a glass of golden dessert wine and a plate of Roquefort and thought about the Dutch merchants who had been sitting on this hillside in different centuries with the same view and the same glass.

The tobacco museum in the old town is one of those institutions that sounds like a joke and turns out to be fascinating. The Dordogne was one of France’s main tobacco-growing regions from the seventeenth century until the late twentieth, and the museum traces the plant’s global history, its role in colonial economies, the cultivation techniques along the river, and the social life that formed around it. The drying barns are still visible in the landscape — long, low structures with ventilation slats, now mostly converted or abandoned — and the museum explains what they were for.

Eat lunch at the market on Wednesday or Saturday morning and then walk the riverside quays where the tobacco merchants’ warehouses have been converted into apartments and restaurants with terraces over the water. The Dordogne here is wide and slow, flanked by willow-lined banks, and the town’s relationship with the river is calmer, more commercial-historical than the cliff-and-castle drama upstream.

When to go: September for harvest season, when the domain doors are open and the vineyards are at their most vivid. October for the Monbazillac in its full autumnal context. The Wednesday and Saturday markets run year-round. Bergerac is an easy day trip from Sarlat or a good base for western Dordogne exploration.