As soon as we realized the trip to Paris could really happen, my friend Sandy, a professional travel agent, immediately started focusing on when -- she planned and booked the flights. I, however, immediately started focusing on wine -- it seemed a shame to go all the way to France and not track down the region our favorite wines come from, the Rhone River valley. I started with the method I have had success with in planning other adventures in unknown areas: using place names and topo maps to explore. Scouring place-names in a foreign language is a little tricky, though; fortunately, I was able to recognize the names of many wines, and was thrilled to see that our A-list wine type, Gigondas, seemed to be from a town that the topos showed as steep, craggy mountains rising out of the Rhone valley. Hiking is right up there with red-wine drinking in terms of our best-loved activities, so this was a coup.

Sandy, meanwhile, took the opposite planning method, more familiar to her (and, I must admit, more practical): she was looking at the options for even getting close to the Rhone area from Paris. And as it turns out, the TGV, or high-speed train, leaves from Paris several times a day and reaches Avignon, right on the Rhone, in a little over two hours. From there all she had to book was the rental car; it was about a 1-hour drive from Avignon up into the hills, along the Wine Road, to the village of Gigondas.

The mountains in this area contain a striking feature: sharp, spiky outcroppings of white rock. They are called the Dentelles de Montmirail, which supposedly has something to do with lace, though the "tooth" reference conjured by the word Dentelles would be more fitting for the jagged white stone. There IS a lace, though, of hiking trails winding up and around the outcroppings, along and over the ridgelines, and the region is popular with hikers. In various nooks and crannies of the mountains, we came across unexpected patches of vineyards, leaves turning reddish in the October sun.

The trails lead right back into the village of Gigondas, so there was no problem in hiking directly over to the town's wine tasting bar on the main square. Unlike California wine tasting, most of the villages in France's wine regions have one central tasting room that tastes and sells wines from all the vineyards in the appellation. The advantage is that you don't have to endure anything like Napa Valley, where tasting the next wine means enduring several miles of roads filled with inebriated drivers, of which you may quickly become one; the downside, I suppose, is that the attendant pouring the wines can't talk about them or provide any recommendations, so you and your taste buds are on your own.

By the time we waddled and wove back to our inn, it was just like so many other trips: we were wishing for another week. Our beloved Gigondas, it turns out, is just one of dozens of wine towns in the region, and each town has its own appellation, and of course its own flavor as a town. Still, as I looked back at those Dentelles the day we drove away, I was pretty sure that, for hikers and drinkers, we made the best choice -- the maps had not led us astray.