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green olives, Jean-Marc pours the adults a round of a good sparkling wine, less yeasty than most versions and full of Pinot Noir character. He’s cooking sanglier (wild boar) for lunch, provided courtesy of his cousin. He got the recipe, he explains, in Phoenix from Vincent Guerithault, the French chef-owner of Vincent’s on Camelback, who ironically began his cooking career in Les Baux at Oustau de Baumanière. Jean-Marc serves the tasty meat with a robust red-wine sauce studded with garlic, and brings out a bottle of his family’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape as a perfect accompaniment. With the food, wine, and a spirited conversation about writing, publishing, and working at home with a spouse (which they do, too), we lose track of the time and get back on the road late. Since we’re joining other friends for dinner at La Riboto, we race off into the sunset at European speed, averaging close to one hundred miles per hour.

Sunshine Erickson and her husband, Alain Garcès, drive in from the opposite direction, from their home in Montpellier. Sunshine used to work for our former publisher in Boston and has been a friend for at least a decade. Alain, a research scientist, did graduate work at MIT, met Sunshine in the city, and returned to France with a wife as well as a degree. She’s now studying wine marketing at a Montpellier university and doing an internship with an online retailer and wholesaler of old vintages. They arrive a little before dinner, as we suggested, to see Mireille and sip an aperitif, a light Cô tes de Provence wine we pick up in Les Arcs at the appellation’s Maison de Vins. Sunshine brings us a wedge of carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting, left over from their American-style Thanksgiving dinner. Cheryl gobbles it a bite at a time for the next two days, savoring it like a rare delicacy.

Christine and Philippe greet us jovially in the dining room, gracefully switching between French and English in their welcome. Because it’s late November, their slowest period, we’re the only guests tonight, as we will be the following two nights. For an opening nibble, they bring out crispy cheese puffs, tapenade, and their version of home-cured cracked green olives, obviously a popular premeal snack during this olive-harvest season. Bill asks Philippe if he could present one of his patented olive-oil tastings to Sunshine and Alain, as he’s done for us in the past. Philippe produces three small carafes of local oil and some pieces of bread, inviting us to sample and savor. They range from mild and buttery, resembling most of the good oils available in the United States, to one that we recognize as Castelas, intense and peppery with hints of almond and artichoke. When Philippe seeks our opinions about the differences, he tells us he likes them all for varying uses. “The one Christine and I drink for breakfast, though, is the Castelas.”

During the tasting, we survey the evening’s table d’hô te menu, featuring an appetizer selection of skate salad and a tian of Provençal vegetables, followed by a main course of either roasted lamb loin or fresh rascasse (a Mediterranean fish used in bouillabaisse). The four of us give Philippe our choices, making sure that collectively we get at least one of all the possibilities, and ask his advice on a wine that will go well with the range of flavors. He suggests a full but soft red such as the 2002 La Pialade Reservé de La Riboto de Taven, a Cô tes du Rhô ne bottled exclusively for the inn for forty years.

Everything sparkles, including his recommended wine. The tian distills the essence of Provence in a single dish, offering tomatoes, eggplant, and zucchini perfectly roasted in their own juices and seasoned with a few grains of flaky salt and a splash of sage-infused olive oil. The boomerang-shaped skate wing comes with greens and a tartarlike sauce grebiche enriched with olive oil and dense with cornichons and capers. Jean-Pierre serves the lamb rosy with jus smelling sweetly of thyme and roasted garlic, and tops the rascasse with a sauce of garlic and late-harvest olive oil. On the side of