If I'd thought about it, black pudding was not what I expected to find in a glass that day. The restaurant was surrounded by some of the most famous vineyards in the South of France, and the world's 2007 Wine of the Year was bottled just a few kilometres away.

But there it stood on my place mat – a small tumbler containing three glistening slices of what the French call boudin noir, topped with a few divinely fragrant slivers of sautéed apple. Fortunately, with my glass of black pudding came a glass of wine. The whole meal was about matching wines with different foods.

Emile-Bernard Souchière, the sommelier, or wine steward, poured from yet another newly-opened bottle and did one of those Oz Clarke-like circular hand motions as he rhapsodised about how this would be a perfect partner for our food. There were flavours of ripe cherry and hints of smoky leather or grilled toast in the wine, he said. This was my seventh glass in under an hour, so it could have been grilled leather and ripe smoke.

But, yes, it was certainly a bullseye of a pairing. The deep, dark spices of the black pudding stomped every last drip of fruit out of the wine.

Emile-Bernard runs Le Caveau des Gourmets at Gigondas, an old stone village less than an hour from Avignon airport in Southern France. His speciality is the latest fashion in French eating, called Verinnes after the small glass inside which each course is artfully layered. It's like tapas, but in a glass.

Our first course was gaspacho with feta cheese, black grape, garlic and extra virgin olive oil and accompanied by a local Gigondas rosé. New wines and new courses proceeded to arrive at 10-minute intervals. Each one of Emile-Bernard's Verinnes was an inventive cocktail of ingredients – such as smoked salmon with hummus, and asparagus purée with fresh prawns beneath a tiny lattice of rosemary needles.

Wines were specifically chosen to match each dish, of course, his policy being that the stronger the food's flavour the more powerful had to be the accompaniment.

There was a spittoon on the table for the fainthearted, but where's the fun in that? These reds and rosés were superb, although some had a deceptively high alcohol content. One of them, Emile-Bernard warned us, would be an explosive 15.5 per cent. But which one? It was like playing Russian roulette with wines instead of bullets.

Needless to say, no one in our party was driving. We were in the Vaucluse département of Provence, having taken advantage of a new Jet2 schedule of thrice-weekly return flights between Leeds-Bradford and Avignon.

Avignon is perhaps best known in England for the bridge that's the star of the famous nursery rhyme Sur Le Pont d'Avignon. On the ancient bridge, according to the song, "everyone is dancing, everyone is dancing". It still stretches across the wide Rhône, and for an admission charge you can dance or walk across from one side to the other.

Avignon itself has very much the atmosphere of York because of its well-preserved city walls and labyrinth of narrow streets. Its version of the Minster is the breathtakingly cavernous Palais des Papes, from where no fewer than nine popes ruled the Roman Catholic church in the 14th century. Their palace is now a World Heritage Site – York Minster has yet to attain that status – and from here you can see the ruined remains of the popes' summer residence at the village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The palace is also a superb viewpoint over a wide swathe of the Provence countryside, where any trip to Avignon must inevitably lead. Twenty years ago, Peter Mayle wrote his best-seller A Year In Provence, which brought an invasion of tourists to the impossibly beautiful hilltop villages which thrust out of the Vaucluse plateau.

The local people – quite a few of them ex-pat Brits – were not a little annoyed with Mayle for blabbing about their quiet Shangri-la to the outside world. When Mayle himself found he was getting two or three coach parties a day rolling up outside his farmhouse near the village of Ménerbes, he decamped to New York, although he's now back in Provence.

There are still tour buses around – probably no more than those found exploring "Herriot Country" in North Yorkshire – but the A Year In Provence hysteria is over. Those centuries-old hilltop communities with houses seemingly carved out of the naked rock are as beautiful as ever, of course, and you can't come here without a visit to the almost-vertical limestone village of Gordes and its nearby red-stone mirror image at the exquisite Roussillon.

Of the larger towns dotted around the plateau, Carpentras is perhaps the most delightful, and the time to be there is Friday morning when up to 400 market stalls bring crowds swarming. Also a must-see is the unspoilt warren of alleys encircled by canals at L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, the top antique-hunting destination in the South of France.

For one night it's a good idea to book in at one of the hotels run by a master chef who helps you cook your own dinner. I stayed at La Bastide des Princes, outside the cherry-growing village of Caderousse, where Pierre Paumel and his wife, Annie, taught us how to make ratatouille in the Provençal way, chopping courgettes, aubergines and three colours of pepper into cubes and frying gently in oil before adding tomatoes which had been cooked separately. It was firm and delicious, not the mush I've always made before.

Pierre knew what he was doing, of course. He once cooked dinner for
Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, and at the end of the meal they asked for his autograph.


Avignon Fact file

Jet2 operates three return flights a week between Leeds-Bradford Airport and Avignon on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Ticket prices start from £19.99. To book seats, visit www.jet2.com


The extraordinary food and wine matching experience is at Le Caveau des Gourmets in Gigondas, around 20 kilometres north of Carpentras. For details, call 0033 490 363482 or visit www.cave-gigondas.fr


Roger Ratcliffe took Annie and Pierre Paumel's Cours de Cuisine at La Bastide des Princes, Caderousse. Telephone 033 490 510459 or visit www.bastide-princes.com


He also stayed at La Somellerie, near Châteauneuf-du-Pape, where wine-tasting is by arrangement. Telephone 033 490 835000 or visit www.la-sommellerie.fr


Vineyard tours in Provence can be arranged by wine expert Olivier Hickman. Telephone 0033 675 101001 or visit www.wine-uncovered.com