We left Lyon at half six in the morning, which in hindsight was ambitious given my partner's inability to function before nine without at least two cups of tea. By the time we reached the outskirts of Montpellier, I was navigating, he was driving, and our Sat Nav had developed what I can only describe as a personality crisis. It sent us down a road that grew progressively narrower until we found ourselves wedged between two stone walls in a village that appeared on no map I have ever seen. A man on a bicycle stopped to watch us attempt a seventeen-point turn. He did not offer help. He simply lit a cigarette and observed, as though this were village entertainment laid on specially for him.

We arrived at the Aramon in Languedoc-Roussillon three hours later than planned, my nerves thoroughly shredded, my partner muttering about never trusting technology again. The property sat at the end of a dusty track, all terracotta roof and shuttered windows, with a garden that looked as though it had been arranged by someone who understood sunshine better than I ever will. I stepped out of the car and immediately walked into a low branch that I am certain moved deliberately. My partner laughed for the first time since Lyon.

Madame Fournier appeared from behind the house, wiping her hands on an apron that had seen several decades of honest use. She was perhaps seventy, with the bearing of someone who had spent her life refusing to be hurried by anyone. She looked at me, then at the car, then back at me, and said something in Occitan that I did not catch. When I apologised for my French, she switched to English with the resigned air of someone who had done this many times before.

"You are the English who are lost," she said. It was not a question.

I admitted that we were. She made a sound somewhere between a hum and a judgment, then led us inside to show us the kitchen. The fridge contained a bottle of local rose and a note in handwriting that wandered across the page like a drunken spider. Madame Fournier explained that this was from her brother, who made the wine and believed that all life's problems could be solved with patience and sufficient alcohol. I thought of the Sat Nav and decided he might be onto something.

We met this brother the following morning. Monsieur Fournier arrived unannounced at nine o'clock with a basket of tomatoes and an opinion about everything. He was eighty-two, wore a cap that predated my parents, and spoke English with the enthusiastic inaccuracy of someone who had learned it entirely from American films. He called me "dude" at least four times in our first conversation. When I mentioned the wine, he spent twenty minutes explaining the exact slope of his vineyard, the angle of the sun at harvest, and why his neighbour's wine was, in his precise phrase, "not wine, but punishment."

His neighbour, it transpired, was a Belgian retiree named Jan who appeared that afternoon while we were attempting to work the outdoor barbecue. Jan had the build of a man who enjoyed his own cooking and the conversational style of someone who had not spoken to another person in several days. He told us about his previous career in insurance, his divorce, his gout, and his passionate belief that the French postal service was engaged in a personal conspiracy against him. He had lived in the village for eight years and spoke no French beyond "deux baguettes" and "non." Madame Fournier, he confided, terrified him. He said this while she was standing directly behind him, carrying a tray of figs. Her expression did not change. Neither did his, as he was unaware of her presence. I did not enlighten him. Some moments are gifts.

That evening we walked to the village for bread, a journey of perhaps twenty minutes that took us past vineyards already heavy with grapes and a field where someone was keeping donkeys with the expression of permanent disappointment that donkeys do so well. The baker was closed, because this was France and we had arrived at twelve minutes past midday. A woman sitting outside her house noticed our confusion and shouted across the street that we should try the tabac, that the baker's cousin sometimes left bread there for strays and English people. She said this without apparent malice. We found the tabac, found the bread, and found the cousin, who was drinking a pastis and explaining to anyone who would listen that his wife had left him for a man who kept goats. "Better goats than nothing," he concluded, and raised his glass to us as though we had asked for his wisdom.

By the time we returned to the Aramon, the light had turned that particular gold that seems to exist only in southern France, the kind that makes everything look briefly like a painting you saw once and half-remembered. My partner was carrying the bread. I was carrying a bottle of Monsieur Fournier's wine that we had somehow acquired along the way. We sat in the garden as the cicadas started up their evening racket, and I thought about how I had arrived stressed and irritated, convinced that the wrong turn and the watching cyclist and the low branch had ruined something. They had not. They had simply been the beginning of a story I would tell later, about the people who were not expecting us and did not need us, but who let us in anyway, with their wine and their opinions and their absolute certainty that life was better taken slowly, with bread from a tabac and wine from a man who called me dude.

I have never been so glad to be lost.