Lavaux

Lavaux is a single slope, but an extraordinary one: some thirty kilometres of steep vineyard falling from the villages above to the northern shore of Lake Geneva, between the outskirts of Lausanne and the edge of Vevey. Seen from the water or from the trains that run along its foot, it reads as a giant staircase of narrow green terraces held up by stone walls, so steep in places that a terrace carries just one row of vines. Across the lake the mountains of Savoy rise straight out of the water, and on clear days the view runs east towards the Valais Alps; the whole composition, rather than any single monument, is what UNESCO inscribed in 2007 as a cultural landscape.

The terraces are a medieval invention. In the twelfth century this shore belonged to the bishops of Lausanne, and Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries began cutting the hillside into workable strips; the name itself comes from an old Franco-Provençal word for "valley". The walls that define the landscape today are mostly younger, documented from the late seventeenth century onwards, and have been rebuilt stone by stone ever since. Their survival is not an accident of history. From the 1970s, campaigns led by the environmentalist Franz Weber led to popular votes that wrote the protection of Lavaux into law, and the slope has stayed vineyard rather than villa land.

Winemakers here speak of "three suns": the light from the sky, the light reflected off the lake, and the warmth stored by the walls and released to the vines at night. The grape is almost entirely Chasselas, a white variety that in Lavaux becomes something quietly mineral, and the two best-placed slopes, Dézaley and Calamin, carry their own grand cru names. The best way to understand the place is on foot: paths thread between the walls from Lutry to Saint-Saphorin, through compact wine villages such as Cully, Epesses and Rivaz with their cellars and steep lanes, and a longer route links Ouchy on the Lausanne waterfront with the castle of Chillon. Walk it in the evening, when the lake turns silver and the walls give back the heat of the day.

Getting there

Lavaux begins just east of Pully, about 7 km from the centre of Lausanne, and runs towards Vevey. The nearest international airport is Geneva (GVA), about 57 km away, with direct trains to Lausanne. Regional trains on the Lausanne–Vevey line stop at the lakeside villages of Lutry, Villette, Cully, Epesses, Rivaz and Saint-Saphorin, and a separate hourly line from Vevey climbs through the upper vineyards to Chexbres and Puidoux. Small tourist trains also run among the terraces from Lutry and Cully in season.