Half an hour above Cannes the air changes. Grasse sits at three hundred and fifty metres in a bowl of hills, several degrees cooler than the coast, and it has been making perfume since the sixteenth century — when the town’s tanners began scenting leather gloves and discovered a better trade. What follows is a day we compose regularly, and the version of it worth having.
The fields, at six in the morning
If your stay falls in May, the centifolia rose is being picked, and the picking happens at dawn because the flower loses its oil in the heat. Standing at the edge of a field above Plascassier at six, with thirty pickers working and the whole valley smelling of it, is not something a museum reproduces. The harvest lasts about three weeks and the date moves with the year.
Late July and August belong to jasmine, picked in the same early hours and in far smaller quantity — the reason a kilo of jasmine absolute costs what it does. Both harvests can be visited privately, with a grower, if arranged some weeks ahead.
- 06:00 — the harvest, in season, with a grower.
- 09:00 — breakfast in the old town, before it opens.
- 10:00 — two hours with a perfumer, composing.
- 13:00 — lunch in the hills, at a table with a view of the valley.
- 16:00 — the Musée International de la Parfumerie, or the gardens at Mouans-Sartoux.
- 18:00 — back on the coast in time for a swim.
The nose
The large houses — Fragonard, Molinard, Galimard — run workshops, and they are perfectly good introductions for a family with children. They are also scheduled, shared and roughly an hour.
The other version is a half-day with an independent perfumer in a small atelier, two or three of you at most, working from their own organ of several hundred materials. You are taught to smell before you are allowed to compose: the difference between a natural and a synthetic musk, why bergamot disappears in twenty minutes and sandalwood does not, how a formula is built in three movements. What you leave with is a written formula and a bottle, and it can be reproduced years later.
This requires arranging — a fortnight’s notice at least, more in season. It is also the element that turns Grasse from a morning into a day.
We arrange the harvest, the perfumer and the table — as one day.
Lunch
Eat in the hills rather than in the town. The country above Grasse toward Cabris and Saint-Cézaire holds a handful of restaurants with long views down the valley to the sea, and one or two that are seriously good. The alternative, which we prefer for a group, is a table laid at a domaine among the flower fields — a producer’s own house, a long lunch outdoors, and nobody else there.
The town itself
Grasse is not a pretty Provençal village and should not be visited as one. It is a working town, steep and worn, with a cathedral holding three Rubens and a genuinely good museum — the Musée International de la Parfumerie, which covers four thousand years of scent and is far more interesting than its subject suggests. Its gardens at Mouans-Sartoux, where the raw plants are grown in rows, are a quiet twenty minutes and open in season.
The old town is best in the late afternoon, when the light comes down the narrow streets and the coach visitors have gone.
Why it works from the coast
Thirty minutes from Cannes, forty-five from Antibes, and several degrees cooler — which in August is the entire argument. It is also one of the few Riviera excursions that genuinely engages children over about eight, because it ends with something they made.
The seasonal element is the one thing that cannot be moved: the roses are in May and the jasmine in high summer, and the day is materially better inside those windows. If your stay falls in one of them, say so early and we will build the morning around the harvest. Our guide to art and culture on the coast sets out the other excursions worth the drive inland.