Jura
"The wine here tastes like sherry and the cheese tastes like the cave it was born in — and neither apologizes for it."
Forested plateaus, oxidized wine, and cheese caves cut into limestone cliffs — the Jura is the quiet mountain range between Burgundy and Switzerland that France kept mostly for itself.
The Jura is the mountain range most travelers drive past on the way from Burgundy to Switzerland, and that is the region’s whole charm — nobody stops, so everything that’s here still belongs entirely to the people who live here. This is limestone plateau country, thick with fir forest and dotted with lakes, famous among the French for two things: a deliberately oxidized wine called vin jaune that tastes like nowhere else in the country, and a cave-aged Comté that regularly wins arguments about the best cheese in France.
Arbois, Louis Pasteur’s hometown and the spiritual capital of Jura wine, is where to taste the vin jaune properly — sealed in its squat clavelin bottle after six years under a veil of yeast, developing a nutty, sherry-like character that either converts you on the first sip or never will. The village of Baume-les-Messieurs sits at the head of a natural amphitheater of cliffs, its Romanesque abbey tucked beneath waterfalls and grottoes carved into the rock. Lons-le-Saunier, the regional capital, built its fortune on salt springs and still centers on a arcaded main street that feels untouched by the last two centuries.
When to go: September and October, for the grape harvest and the first Comté wheels of the new season, with the beech and fir forests turning color on the plateau above.
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Places in Jura
france Arbois
The unofficial wine capital of the Jura, a stone-built town along the Cuisance river where Louis Pasteur did his early wine research and vin jaune, the region's strange, sherry-like specialty, still ages in oak for over six years.
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france Arc-et-Senans
A salt factory built as a utopia, half-moon shaped and dropped into the Jura countryside by an architect who wanted to redesign society along with the buildings, and who only ever finished the half.
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france Baume-les-Messieurs
A village hidden inside a dead-end limestone canyon in the Jura, built around an ancient abbey and surrounded by cheese cellars ageing the region's prized Comté in caves cut into the cliffs.
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france Champagnole
A quiet forest town we used purely as a base, and which turned out to be the best decision of the whole trip once we found the Hérisson waterfalls a short drive away.
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france Château-Chalon
A clifftop village of barely one hundred and fifty people that somehow invented vin jaune, and where the ruined abbey above the vines gave us the single best view of the whole Jura wine country.
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france Dole
The town where Louis Pasteur was born in a tannery by the canal, and where the old quarter's arcaded streets convinced me the Jura had a proper city hiding at its edge all along.
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france Foncine-le-Haut
A high Jura ski village where the winter trade used to be carving wood and building clocks by hand, and where a few workshops still keep both crafts alive between chairlift runs.
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france Les Rousses
A high plateau lake resort near the Swiss border where I finally understood why the French call cross-country skiing a national obsession rather than a niche sport.
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france Lons-le-Saunier
A salt-built spa town in the Jura and the birthplace of the man who wrote La Marseillaise, its arcaded main street and thermal park giving it a quieter, more civic charm than the Jura's postcard villages.
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france Mouthe
France's coldest village, where the Doubs river begins as a trickle out of the rock and the winters get so brutal locals half-jokingly call it French Siberia, which didn't stop us from strapping on skis and loving it.
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france Nozeroy
A medieval capital so small today that it's easy to drive past it, though its ramparts and fortified gates still guard a hilltop that once ruled its own slice of the old Comté de Bourgogne.
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france Ornans
The Loue river town that raised Gustave Courbet, whose realist paintings of these exact houses and this exact water taught me to see the Jura the way he insisted on painting it — unglamorized, and better for it.
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france Poligny
The self-declared capital of Comté cheese, where a fruitière let me into a cellar of ten thousand wheels and I finally understood why the French argue about affinage the way we argue about mezcal back home.
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france Pupillin
A village of maybe two hundred people and roughly as many wine cellars, self-declared capital of the Poulsard grape, where every second door seemed to open onto someone's family cave.
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france Saint-Claude
A town squeezed into a river gorge so tight the streets have to climb in switchbacks, famous for carving pipes and cutting diamonds, which is a stranger combination than it sounds until you see the place.
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france Saint-Point
The lakeside estate where the poet Lamartine came home to write, and where his château now overlooks a lake we spent an entire lazy afternoon paddling across instead of reading a single line of his poetry.
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france Salins-les-Bains
A UNESCO-listed saltworks built into a river gorge, where I walked underground galleries that funded the Franche-Comté for a thousand years before soaking in the same brine that made the town rich.
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