A Stay at Belles Rives, Juan-les-Pins

We arrived at the end of April, when the light on the Cap turns everything the color of white wine. The taxi dropped us at a villa the color of cream, wrapped in bougainvillea, and I stood on the pavement a moment before going in. This was the Villa Saint-Louis once. Fitzgerald lived here with Zelda in 1926, and the early chapters of Tender Is the Night were written somewhere behind those shutters. In 1929 a Russian immigrant named Boma Estène turned the villa into the first hotel on the Riviera with its feet in the water, and his family never let it go. His great-grandson runs it today.

We were meant to stay two nights. We stayed four. I think that tells you most of what you need to know.

Mornings began on the balcony, where breakfast comes on white china painted with little penguins, a detail from the hotel’s Art Deco childhood that nobody has ever had the heart to modernize. The original granito is still underfoot. The Ruhlmann furniture is still in the salon. Hotels talk about heritage; this one just kept its things.

But I am a sommelier, so let me tell you the real reason to come.

At dinner you face the sea, and in the sea sits Île Saint-Honorat, where monks have lived since the fifth century and where they still farm seven hectares of vines. Wine has been made on this coast since Greek and Roman antiquity; the vine reached the Mediterranean’s edge long before it climbed inland. And here is the detail I love most: the island’s community is Cistercian, answering to the abbey of Cîteaux, in Burgundy. The little island you can see from the dinner table is tied by a thousand-year thread to the region where I built my life in wine. I have sailed out to Saint-Honorat on an earlier trip, and walking between the vines and the old abbey, with the sea on every side, is quietly breathtaking.

That view gave Aymeric, the head sommelier, an idea. He has been at Belles Rives for sixteen years, and he built one of the most quietly original wine programs in France around it.

« Le chef fait voyager le client par la cuisine. Mon rôle, c’est de le faire voyager à travers les vins. »
The chef makes the guest travel through the kitchen. My role is to make them travel through the wines.

So the list sails the Mediterranean. A white from Korčula, the Croatian island phylloxera never reached, made from a grape that grows nowhere else. A wine from Gorgona, the last prison island in Europe, its vines tended by men finishing their sentences. A Malvasia grown on the volcano of Stromboli. A Vermentino from Sardinia whose grapes are lowered into the sea for an hour before pressing, an old Roman habit someone had the nerve to revive, and yes, you can taste the salt. There are bottles aged under the water off Porquerolles. At the end of the meal you keep the numbered menu as a souvenir. Aymeric said something that evening I have been repeating since: the point is that guests leave having understood something.

Lunch is simpler and just as serious. A table above the water, fish from this sea, something cold found three islands away. Give it two hours. However far you traveled to get here, nothing on this coast is meant to be rushed.

This is also the Riviera without the noise. Juan-les-Pins and Antibes have none of the flash of Saint-Tropez; there is an understatement here, a quiet, bookish confidence that suits people who would rather notice things than be noticed. You can walk the sea path along the ramparts without ever entering town and be entirely happy. Old Antibes itself is twenty minutes on foot, and worth every one of them, though a taxi takes five. The center hums around the covered market, all spice merchants and mounded produce, but two streets away the lanes go quiet and fill with flowers. Picasso spent the autumn of 1946 working inside the Château Grimaldi, and the museum that grew around those months still holds the joy he found on this coast after the war. And for the readers: Antibes Books, the English bookshop in the old town, keeps a few guidebooks by the door and then rewards you properly, with shelves of classics and good contemporary novels. I went in for a browse and came out an hour later, inspired. Fitzgerald would have approved.

At night the hotel turns gold. There is a piano in the Bar Fitzgerald and someone who knows what to do with it, and the terrace hums quietly in several languages. Every June the hotel awards the Prix Fitzgerald to a novelist; Julian Barnes took it this year. The literary life here is not wallpaper. It still shows up for dinner.

Who is this stay for? Readers. Wine people, of course, but really anyone who wants their beauty with some history in it, who would rather understand a place than collect it. If your idea of the Riviera is a schedule, this is not your hotel. If your idea of the Riviera is a long lunch inside a novel, book three nights.

The practical part. Belles Rives sits on the water in Juan-les-Pins; old Antibes is a twenty-minute walk or five-minute taxi, and the coastal trains make Nice, Cannes and Monaco easy day trips. La Passagère, the restaurant, holds a Michelin star. April, May, June and September are the kind months; October is the quiet secret, cooler but lovely. The Riviera also ends a French wine journey beautifully: Paris and Champagne first, or Lyon, Burgundy and the Rhône, then south to the sea. The hotel hosted two nights of our stay; we extended and paid for two more, which is its own review. All opinions, as ever, are mine.

From the dinner table you can see an island with vines on it. We can take you there by boat, walk the abbey vineyard with you, and bring you back for dinner with the sommelier. Ask us about the Islands and Abbey day.

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