Wine Walking Holidays
The Burgundy Vineyard Walk
Picnic on Rhone and Northern Beaujolais Walk
A&C’s Vineyard Walks walking wine tours
Arblaster and Clarke, the leading wine tour specialists, offer the ultimate walking wine holidays with our ‘Vineyard Walks’ to Burgundy, Alsace, the Rhone, Beaujolais, Rioja, the Douro and Piemonte. Our vineyard trails are planned to take in the great vineyards, to give the best views of the châteaux and to take you to wine tastings at great cellars.
Our Vineyard Walks are genuinely wine tours on foot! The trails have been walked out extensively by our team (it takes us about one man/month to set up a European vineyard walk, we are not just following arduous French hiking trails, or putative paths shown on maps – all too often these go somewhere neither beautiful nor useful and sometimes nowhere at all!) The vineyard walks are designed to be interesting and educational and on one of our vineyard walks you will begin to see all those differences in soil and aspect which the French call “terroir”.
On a typical day on a Vineyard Walk you will stroll for an hour through the vineyards to our first tasting, then onto a picnic lunch, then more walking and tastings! You will cover an easy five to eight miles a day although this varies with each tour so please read the descriptions carefully. If at any stage you want to “opt out” the coach can be called easily.
On many of our on foot holidays, a small local mini-bus is on hand throughout the tour. It will transfer your bags and wine after tastings and to take you into the local towns or we have taxis on standby. We use characterful accommodation, comfortable family-run 2* and 3* hotels, and in the Douro stay on a famous wine estate. (All hotel rooms are of course are en-suite, and many have a swimming pool). Arblaster and Clarke have experienced leaders who are enthusiastic walkers with a good knowledge of wine, the trails, the vineyards, food and the region.
The ground covered on our Vineyard Walks varies according to the tour, Burgundy is the lightest of the walks, Loire, Champagne and Bordeaux are also easy walking, but the trails in Rioja, Piemonte, Alsace and certainly in Douro are more strenuous, but would still not really be considered hiking. The party size for all these European walking holidays is limited to just 16 people (or just 12 on our Douro walk).
For private groups of 10 – 16 participants we can also arrange wine walks to all the above areas, plus to the Central and Eastern Loire, Champagne, the Rhone and Bordeaux – all of which are areas to which we have personally arranged scheduled wine walks to in the past.
View Other Ideas and Past ToursTours
Burgundy Cote D'Or Vineyard Walk
20 - 26 May 2012
Harvest Burgundy Vineyard Walk
2 - 8 September 2012
Alsace Vineyard Walk
9 - 15 September 2012
Bordeaux Vineyard Walk
10 - 16 September 2012
Rioja Vineyard Walk
17 - 23 September 2012
Douro Vineyard Walk
7 - 13 October 2012
Ribera del Duero, Rueda & Toro Vineyard Walk
15 - 21 April 2013
Piemonte Vineyard Walk
6 - 12 May 2012, 5 - 11 May 2013
