How to Eat Your Way Around France With 7 Culinary Walking Trails Where Food and Wine Are the Star Attractions

French food is fabulous, no argument from me there, but part of what makes it great are the stories behind the dishes. Discovering how some of these came into being, and the subsequent festivals that celebrate them, is part of what makes France a culinary adventure. 

And, of course, the best way to understand it is to experience it yourself with a rather wonderful combination of walking tour and five-course meal, known as randonnée gourmande. I’ve done a handful of these over the years, and they’ve become one of my favorite ways to discover new dishes.

One of my favorites was the Randos des Terroirs in Seine-et-Marne, an hour east of Paris. We set off through fields and forests, stopping every couple of miles for a course paired with something local, often a Brie de Meaux or a glass from a small producer. What better way is there to discover French cuisine?

7 French Culinary Walking Trails For Your Foodie Bucket List

Put on your hiking boots and get ready to fill up on the best of regional French food with these seven amazing food trails.

The Randos des Terroirs in Seine-et-Marne

The Randos des Terroirs are organized by the Seine-et-Marne tourist board across several villages in the department east of Paris, places like Jouarre, Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin, and the area around Coulommiers. Each walk runs somewhere between 6 and 9 miles and is broken into stages by food, usually five or six stops.

The pacing is the clever part. You walk a stretch through wheat fields or along the Petit Morin river, arrive at a farm or a village hall, and there’s an apéritif waiting. The next leg ends with a starter. Then the main, then cheese, then dessert, then coffee at the finish. Seine-et-Marne is Brie country, so the cheese course is the point of the day for most people. Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun are both AOP-protected and made within a short drive of where you’re walking.

What I liked, when I did a similar walk in this area a few years back, was how the producers themselves turn up. The Brie comes from the dairy whose cows you just walked past. The wine is often from a small Île-de-France vineyard.

The Alsace Wine Route on Foot

Most people drive the Route des Vins d’Alsace, which runs roughly 105 miles from Marlenheim down to Thann. Walking it, or sections of it, is a different experience entirely. 

The Sentier Viticole des Grands Crus and dozens of shorter marked loops thread through the vineyards above villages like Riquewihr, Hunawihr, and Eguisheim, with signposts that explain the grand cru parcels, the soil types, and which winemaker owns which row.

In summer and early fall, several villages run their own randonnées gourmandes. Bergheim and Mittelbergheim both put on walks where you stop in winemakers’ courtyards and cellars, tasting Riesling, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Gris alongside tarte flambée, choucroute, or kougelhopf. 

I’d suggest basing yourself in Ribeauvillé or Kaysersberg for a few days and picking walks based on which villages have something on. 

The tourist offices keep updated lists. Word of advice, wear proper shoes, because although the vineyard paths look gentle until you’ve done eight miles of them with five glasses of wine in you. Take it from someone who has been there and done it.

Burgundy’s Vineyard Rambles Between Beaune and Meursault

Burgundy has some great walking food events. The Marche Gourmande des Climats moves among villages on the Côte de Beaune, including Pommard, Volnay, Meursault, and Puligny-Montrachet. The walk goes directly through the climats, the small parcels of vineyard that were given UNESCO World Heritage status in 2015.

A typical route runs 7 or 8 miles with six stops. Gougères and Crémant at the start, jambon persillé somewhere in the middle, coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon for the main, an Époisses or a Cîteaux at the cheese stop, and a tarte to finish. Each course is paired with a wine from a producer working that exact stretch of slope. The 1er crus and grands crus are right there under your feet, marked with little stone walls and old iron gates.

The Paulée events in the fall, held by individual winemakers after the harvest, are harder to get into but worth chasing. If you can’t, the public walks organized through the Beaune tourist office and the Hospices de Beaune in November are easier to book. 

Provence and the Olive Trails of the Alpilles

I don’t think any of us need an excuse to visit Provence; I certainly don’t. South of Avignon, the Alpilles range cuts a low white limestone ridge through the Bouches-du-Rhône. The villages on its flanks, Maussane-les-Alpilles, Mouriès, Les Baux, and Fontvieille, sit in a dense web of olive groves that produce some of the most respected oils in France. 

The Vallée des Baux-de-Provence AOP covers the area, and the harvest runs from late October into December.

The Fête de l’Olive in Mouriès, usually held in mid-September, includes guided walks through the groves with stops at the mills. You see the trees, taste the oil straight from the press at later events, and eat dishes built around it: tapenade on grilled bread, anchoïade, gardiane de taureau from the Camargue just south, and the small black Lucques and green Picholine olives the region is known for.

The smell of crushed olives in a working mill is something I will never forget.

Outside of festival days, the GR6 long-distance path crosses the Alpilles, and shorter loops from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence take you past Glanum, the Greco-Roman site, and out through groves that have been worked since antiquity. 

Pack a picnic from the Wednesday market in Saint-Rémy and buy your oil at the source, at Moulin Castelas or Moulin du Calanquet. You’ll never buy groceries at a grocery store again after tasting it.

Périgord Truffle Walks in the Black Diamond Country

The Dordogne, specifically the area around Sarlat, Sorges, and the Causse de Limogne, is the heart of black truffle country. Tuber melanosporum, the Périgord black, comes into season in December and runs through February, with the markets at Sarlat, Sainte-Alvère, and Lalbenque in full swing through the winter. 

This is the most expensive walking food in France, by a long way.

The Maison de la Truffe in Sorges runs guided walks with a trufficulteur and a dog, usually a Lagotto Romagnolo or a mixed-breed terrier trained on the scent. You walk through the truffières, watch the dog work, and learn how the truffle grows in symbiosis with oak and hazel roots in the chalky soil. 

The tour ends with a tasting: truffle on scrambled eggs, on toast with butter and salt, sometimes shaved over a slice of foie gras from a nearby farm.

Winter walks here are short, three or four miles at most, because the terrain is rough and the days are short. I did one near Sarlat one January and remember the cold smell of oak leaves and damp limestone. It was fascinating watching the dogs start digging, and a small black lump came up out of the dirt that, on the trufficulteur’s kitchen table an hour later, tasted unbelievable.

Normandy’s Cider Route Through the Pays d’Auge

The Route du Cidre runs a 25-mile loop through the Pays d’Auge between Cambremer, Beuvron-en-Auge, and Bonnebosq. Now I don’t drink beer; I just don’t like it, so my substitute is cider. And I have to say, it doesn’t come much better than in Normandy, other than the scrumpy stuff in Somerset in the UK

Walking the whole loop in one go is a lot, but the side roads and farm tracks make for excellent shorter walks, especially in May when the apple blossom is out, and in October during the harvest. The producers along the route display a Cru de Cambremer sign if they meet the regional quality criteria, and most are open for tastings.

The gourmet walks here are organized by individual producers and the local tourist offices. A typical Marche Gourmande du Pays d’Auge runs 5 or 6 miles between farms, stopping for cider, pommeau, and Calvados at one, andouille de Vire and tripes à la mode de Caen at another, and the cheeses, Camembert de Normandie, Livarot, Pont-l’Évêque, all AOP, at a third. Teurgoule, the slow-baked rice pudding with cinnamon, often shows up at the end.

Beuvron-en-Auge is the prettiest base. The half-timbered houses around the central square are 16th and 17th-century, and the Sunday market is small but good. From there, you can walk out into the orchards within ten minutes. If you visit in late October, the Cidre Nouveau is being pressed, and the air around the farms smells like apple peel and yeast.

The Chestnut and Cheese Trails of the Cévennes

The Cévennes, the mountain range that runs through Lozère, Gard, and Ardèche, is one of the least-visited parts of France. The châtaigneraie, the chestnut forests, were the region’s food for centuries. There’s an AOP for Châtaigne d’Ardèche, and the chestnut shows up in everything from soup to cake to a sweet cream you can spread on bread.

The GR70, the Chemin de Stevenson, follows the route Robert Louis Stevenson walked with his donkey Modestine in 1878, a journey he wrote up as Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. It runs about 170 miles from Le Puy-en-Velay to Alès. Most people walk it in sections. 

The food along the way is mountain food: Pélardon, the small goat cheese with AOP status, served with chestnut honey or fig jam; charcuterie from black pigs; trout from the streams; and bread baked in wood-fired ovens that some villages have kept running.

In October and November, several villages, Saint-Jean-du-Gard and Joyeuse among them, hold castagnades, chestnut festivals built around walks through the forests with a forager or producer, ending with roasted chestnuts, chestnut soup, and Pélardon melted on toast.