Last summer we visited the Chateau de Raissac which is just a few miles from our village in Thezan on the road to Beziers.

It is a house of many parts.
It is owned by an eccentric and glamorous couple Jean and Christine Viennet.
Christine, who is a potter by trade, specialising in Trompe l’Oeil plates of fruit and vegetables also runs a Musée de Faïence in her stables where she shows her eclectic, but also fairly comprehensive collection of European ceramics.
Jean, an artist, also has a vineyard on the estate and both of them also run the house as a Relais de Campagne, renting out both bedrooms and function rooms as desired.
We were taken on a tour of the museum by Christine, a very elegant blonde Norwegian lady, and then taken around the house proper, the walls there covered by family portraits painted by her husband.
The interesting things about these were that the family members were inevitably pictured as if posing underwater, always naked and always with two sets of eyes, one above the other.

Christine painted by Jean

Yes well, I did say they were eccentric.
Scattered among the paintings were photographs from various illustrious friends of theirs.
I spotted Prince Rainier of Monaco and Jackie Kennedy.
If you want to see more of the family they have a comprehensive web site here.

It was a terrific trip, totally fascinating and we found the whole set up completely riveting.
Well worth a detour.

Last Saturday as Sile and I were again house bound by the sleety rain of January in Waterford we got the mistaken notion that a walk into town here might be entertaining.
On the way home I decided to drop into the local SuperValue supermarket on the off chance that they might have a bottle of cheap white wine of sufficient quality to console me both for the weather and that I had just finished my last bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, carried over from the Languedoc last August.
They had just one bottle that fitted my wants.
It was French, white, it came in at €9.99, reckoned cheap for drinkable wine here, but the thing that cheered me, and parted the gray skies was that it was a wine of Domaine de Raissac made by Jean Viennet.
The Lord only knows how it had made the journey to Waterford but for me it became a beaker full of the warm south.