I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I got my first taste of Champagne-Ardenne by way of a rogue wheel of cheese. We'd been driving from Calais since dawn, me navigating with all the competence of a sleep-deprived pigeon, when I decided the back seat needed reorganising. One sharp corner near Charleville-Mezieres later, and my carefully selected Comte from the hypermarket in Reims launched itself like a dairy missile straight into the footwell. The smell was extraordinary. The dog looked personally offended. My partner just sighed in that particular way that suggests this is why we can't have nice things.

By the time we rolled up to Maubert Fontaine, I was ready to abandon the car and possibly my cheese-stained dignity. The property sits in a proper pocket of countryside, all rolling fields and that particular hush you only get when mobile signal becomes theoretical rather than actual. Our host had left the key in the traditional French manner that still feels faintly illicit, and we stepped inside to the smell of wood polish and yesterday's bread from the village boulangerie that we'd passed three kilometres back. I made a mental note to return there immediately, possibly at a jog.

The kitchen at Maubert Fontaine is the sort that demands you cook something ambitious and slightly beyond your abilities. We unpacked our bags, then unpacked our ambitions. The local market in Charleville runs on Saturday mornings, and I arrived with the desperate energy of someone who has been eating motorway sandwiches for eight hours. The stalls were glorious: fat boudin blanc sausages curling in their trays, chickens with actual flavour profiles, vegetables that still had soil clinging to them like a badge of honour. I bought a rabbit because it seemed like the French thing to do, then spent forty minutes wondering if I possessed the necessary emotional fortitude to joint it myself. Reader, I did not. The butcher did it for me with the weary patience of a man who has seen many British holidaymakers attempt rural self-sufficiency.

That evening we attempted a cassoulet-adjacent situation with our market haul. The kitchen's range cooker is a temperamental beast that runs hot in the way of a small forge, and our first attempt at the bread topping emerged somewhere between "artisanal" and "archaeological." We ate it anyway, accompanied by a bottle of local champagne that cost less than a London round of drinks and tasted like liquid celebration. The dog, still nursing his cheese grievance, watched every mouthful with the intensity of a food critic who has already written his negative review.

The village pub, if you can stretch that term to cover a small bar-tabac with three tables and a dog called Bernard, became our evening ritual. The patron poured beer with the generous measure of a man who measures success in conversation rather than profit margins. We practised our dreadful French; he practised his slightly better English; somehow we communicated entirely through the universal language of pointing at things and making appreciative noises. On our third visit he produced a plate of rillettes that I still think about in quiet moments, accompanied by cornichons sharp enough to wake the dead.

By day four I had developed what I can only describe as market anxiety, a condition wherein one becomes convinced that superior produce exists at stalls not yet visited. We drove to a slightly farther market in Rethel, got lost in a one-way system designed by someone with a grudge against navigation, and arrived to find the best cheese seller already packing up. I bought his last scrap of Chaource anyway, a small tragedy of a cheese that we ate in the car with our fingers like absolute animals.

Our final night demanded something special, or at least something that didn't involve me setting off the smoke alarm again. We returned to the boulangerie for their last baguettes, bought pate en croute from a charcuterie that smelled of pepper and patience, and assembled a picnic that we ate on the property's terrace as the light went golden across the fields. The champagne was warm, the bread was proper, and I realised with the clarity that only comes from proper carbohydrates that this was exactly what I'd needed: not a holiday of grand monuments, but of small excellent things eaten slowly, with my hands still faintly smelling of cheese from a week before.

The wheel of Comte, incidentally, survived the journey home. We finished it on the ferry, sharing it with the dog, who had finally forgiven me. Some things, it turns out, are worth the wait.