Thomas and Genevieve, who you met in an earlier post, invited us up to their place in Grasse for dinner on Tuesday evening.
The suggestion was also made that, as Grasse is an interesting little French hill town, we should come in the afternoon for a look around before dinner. Then, given Thomas and David share a love of single malts, and that they wanted us to try various items from their cellar, that we should perhaps consider staying the night.
A wonderful idea!
Grasse is up in the hills and only 10 miles from Cannes. You can see the sea from there but the town itself has quite a different feel from the coastal towns we have seen.
In the 1500’s the town was most famous for leather gloves but when perfumed gloves became the big thing in the 1600’s they began cultivating flowers and distilling essences. That marked the beginning of the perfume industry and is what Grasse is most famous for today, making more than ¾ of the world’s perfume.
Yep – all the sophisticated Parisian perfumes you see are Grasse essences blended into secret formulas by a ‘nose’.
I had a new appreciation of why perfume is the price it is when I got to grips with the maths of the thing. Take Jasmine as an example -
It takes 10,000 flowers to produce 1kg petals and 1 tonne petals to produce 1500mls essence.
So a 50ml bottle uses 333,333 flowers!
Unfortunately his nibs started sneezing and carrying on about 100 metres from the perfume factory - so not much in the way of photos, except this fountain outside which I was quite taken with.
A fanciful place Grasse; lots of quirky items on walls and doors.
By 6 pm we were headed up to Thomas’s place. It is only a 10 minute walk from the centre of town, but so tranquil.
They have a terraced garden full of olive, orange and apple trees and keep sand turtles (a rare protected kind that can’t swim). They bottle and pickle tons of wonderful things from jams to olives and make wines and liqueurs from others.
Usually when people want me to try fruit wine I have to dig hard for polite things to say. However we kicked off the evening with a delicious homemade orange wine served over ice and accompanied by socca (sp?) a Moroccan pancake kind of thing made with chickpea flour, torn up and eaten with marinated homegrown olives and tapenade. The wine and food were totally scrumptious and of course sitting out on the terrace looking at the sunset over Grasse was pretty good too.
The boys soon left the orange wine for the girls however. David opened the Balvenie DoubleWood whisky he had discovered in Scotland and Thomas brought out his ceremonial whisky tasting cup.
It all looked rather civilised and remained that way through a lovely dinner accompanied by some cellared wines and dessert accompanied by 100 year old armagnac made by Genevieve’s great grandfather.
So a 50ml bottle uses 333,333 flowers!
Unfortunately his nibs started sneezing and carrying on about 100 metres from the perfume factory - so not much in the way of photos, except this fountain outside which I was quite taken with.
A fanciful place Grasse; lots of quirky items on walls and doors.
By 6 pm we were headed up to Thomas’s place. It is only a 10 minute walk from the centre of town, but so tranquil.
They have a terraced garden full of olive, orange and apple trees and keep sand turtles (a rare protected kind that can’t swim). They bottle and pickle tons of wonderful things from jams to olives and make wines and liqueurs from others.
Usually when people want me to try fruit wine I have to dig hard for polite things to say. However we kicked off the evening with a delicious homemade orange wine served over ice and accompanied by socca (sp?) a Moroccan pancake kind of thing made with chickpea flour, torn up and eaten with marinated homegrown olives and tapenade. The wine and food were totally scrumptious and of course sitting out on the terrace looking at the sunset over Grasse was pretty good too.
The boys soon left the orange wine for the girls however. David opened the Balvenie DoubleWood whisky he had discovered in Scotland and Thomas brought out his ceremonial whisky tasting cup.
It all looked rather civilised and remained that way through a lovely dinner accompanied by some cellared wines and dessert accompanied by 100 year old armagnac made by Genevieve’s great grandfather.
Probably that is where we should have stopped but were persuaded to try home made prune liqueur. I took a sip and gave the rest to David who quaffed it and was soon advised to have a wee lie down in the hammock.
He made a valiant effort to keep making sense but things were looking pretty relaxed by the end of the evening.
He made a valiant effort to keep making sense but things were looking pretty relaxed by the end of the evening.
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