Château de la Gaude

Château de la Gaude has seventeen rooms and suites, three restaurants and a bar, and that ratio tells a traveller most of what they need to know. Behind the calm façade of an eighteenth-century bastide, ten minutes from the cafés of Aix-en-Provence, sits an exuberant hotel: a working wine estate where the evening is the main event, the art is loud and the mountain Cézanne painted again and again fills the horizon.

The eating is spread across the estate like a small village of tables. Le Art is the gastronomic restaurant, with a terrace for summer nights. La Source surrounds an ancient natural spring in a vaulted, cave-like room. At Le K, a helicopter covered in ostrich feathers and crystals hangs over the diners, which is either the most absurd or the most cheerful thing in Provence, and L'Atelier serves pizza and cocktails at sunset. Below ground, a cellar of some thirty thousand bottles keeps an Armagnac from every year since the beginning of the last century.

The wine above ground is the estate's own. Twenty-five hectares of organic vines run down towards the gardens, and a tasting and a tour of the winery, is the easiest way to understand why the Coteaux d'Aix deserves more attention than it gets. The listed French garden adds ponds, fountains and a maze of clipped yew in which wine-tasters cheerfully lose their way.

With only seventeen rooms, choosing one matters more than usual. The seven in the château are the real thing, with stone fireplaces, old mouldings and windows over the formal garden, but there is no lift. The farm buildings next door are lighter and more contemporary, the villa among the vines suits families or friends, and the small secluded suites hidden in the greenery are romantic for a night and rather remote for a week.

Between meals, the estate keeps up the surprises. The spa in the old stud farm has six treatment rooms dressed in the styles of Hermès, Gaultier, Missoni and Kenzo: surely the only massages in Provence with a designer label. Aix is close enough for a morning among its markets and Cézanne's studio, and by sunset everyone is back at L'Atelier with a glass from the estate, watching Sainte-Victoire turn pink.

All of this gives La Gaude a different energy from the usual resort. Elsewhere, guests compare tans; here they compare tasting menus, and breakfast talk turns on last night's dinner and tonight's booking. The pool, a short walk through the vines, is quiet in the afternoons, less for lack of guests than because most of them are digesting. Villa La Coste nearby is the serious collector's estate; La Gaude is its greedier cousin, where the money goes on the table rather than the wardrobe. The flip side of three restaurants, a bar and seventeen rooms is that the tables sometimes get more attention than the bedrooms: air conditioning has failed in a heatwave, room service can be slow and turndowns are forgotten. Rates swing wildly through the summer, and a car is indispensable.

Seventeen rooms, three restaurants and a bar: the arithmetic is simple. It takes four nights to eat through the place properly, and if a birthday falls somewhere in between, the cellar will have the right year waiting.