Fine French fare from Paris to the Camargue with Tauck

When it comes to river cruising, Tauck is known for its variety and quality of excursions. Combine that with a 10-day itinerary that takes you from Paris to Lyon and down through the Rhone River Valley and what you also get is a world-class culinary adventure.

From cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu to truffle hunting and scouring the bakeries and food markets of Lyon and Avignon, every day offered a new treat.

Oh, and did I mention the wine?

It was the Rhone Valley and its wines that initially drew me to the cruise. But it was the mix of traditional touring blended with top-notch wine tastings, locally sourced gourmet meals and culinary-focused excursion options that made this an ideal choice both for true foodies and more traditional travelers who, like me, are less singularly culinary focused (read: picky eaters) but who always appreciate an outstanding meal.

We started in Paris, with two nights in a recently renovated room at the luxurious InterContinental Paris Le Grand. Our dining standards were set high with the welcome dinner at Fouquet’s on the Champs Elysees, where we had perfectly cooked veal in the restaurant’s trademark Champs Elysees sauce.

The next day, the itinerary offered a more traditional outing: a walking tour of the St. Germain neighborhood, topped off with a lesson in chocolate-making — with a tasting, of course — at Un Dimanche.

Chocolate remained a theme the next day, when, before departing by high-speed rail to catch our ship in Lyon, we visited Paris’ famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school for hands-on lessons in making traditional macarons.

Our end results didn’t look so great, but they tasted good, and we packed them away to take with us to the ship (where it turned out the last thing we needed was extra food stashed in our minifridge).

The next stop was Lyon, known as the gastronomy capital of France. We started with a walking tour of the city’s Old Town, where we wound our way through secret passageways used by the Resistance in World War II before ending up in front of the city’s world-famous praline brioche bakeries.

From there, we visited Les Halles food market, where residents do their shopping when preparing special meals. That afternoon, a wine tasting that focused on the Beaujolais region was also offered.

Over the next few days, we watched two adorable yellow Labradors hunt truffles at the Ayme Truffe farm in Grignan; sat down with a ranch family for a traditional lunch of stew and locally grown red rice in the Camargue region; learned how to cook poached eggs with tomato chutney, black olives, capers and tomato foam at the cooking school of three-Michelin-star chef Anne-Sophie Pic; and sampled some of France’s finest wines at Le Verger des Papes in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape region.

Somehow we also managed to find room for the onboard meals, which highlighted the best of local wines and food.

Fortunately, the cruise also had plenty of bikes onboard for both guided and solo rides to help us burn off all the extra calories.