This weekend is the fete de St. Mont; a celebration of all things related to St. Mont wine. The grapes are grown in and around several villages in this area and each village celebrates this weekend; the wine showrooms are all opened up, cleaned and polished, to welcome all comers to taste, and of course, buy their products. There are cheese makers, artists, jewellery makers, ham producers……. everyone gets in on the act. At the first stop, you buy a wine glass with a string attached, which you hang around your neck; this way, it doesn’t matter how much you drink, you never lose your glass!

You can eat in any of the villages; the group of friends we went with decided we’d eat in Lupiac, the birthplace of the legendary Dartagnan, as the meal there was being prepared by the jeunes vignerons (young wine growers), who have a reputation for providing good food. They lived up to their reputation; we had a lovely meal in a very convivial atmosphere. Some Musketeers of the Gers equivalent of the Sealed Knot were putting on a demonstration outside the Dartagnan museum, so we listened and watched to learn how a musket works, then chatted with the guys afterwards; I was fascinated to learn that their costumes are all made entirely by hand, just as they would have been in the days of the Musketeers. A labour of love indeed! As we left Lupiac, dozens of quad bikes arrived for lunch, fresh from the local mud bath by the look of them and their quads.

We visited another couple of wineries after lunch; one had an art exhibition, with the paintings hung from the huge wine stores, another was a lovely old chateau which has been bought by the Plaimont group of producers, but whose sole inhabitant is the 87-year-old lady who has lived there since she married the vineyard owner, now long dead. The plan, I gather, is to wait till she dies, then renovate the chateau and turn it into a conference centre.

Useless fact of the day; when Musketeers of old needed to clean the barrel of their musket, they used to wee into it!