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The Rhône Valley? That’s just heavy industry and nuclear power stations, isn’t it?

Not really. I only once or twice caught a glimpse through the roadside trees of those looming concrete funnels on a recent tour of the region. Still, the reactors have spawned some strange fruit - or, rather, crocodiles.

What to do with all the hot water generated by cooling the plutonium? Why, start a crocodile farm, of course. That is what Luc and Eric Fougeirol decided to do 20 years ago, and you can now visit their business in the village of Pierrelatte. It is all fascinatingly incongruous, even if the crocodiles are destined to be handbags.

Indeed, the most thermonuclear thing about the landscape is the absence of people - tourists, anyway, and that is generally a good thing, as long as the absence does not include you. The Rhône-Alpes, the largest region in France, now has its very own guidebook, courtesy of Cadogan (an imprint that is usually dependable for an intelligent read). I wanted to explore this part of the south, hunkered just above more glamorous Provence, before it started beeping on everyone else’s touristic Geiger counter, too.

I even managed to find room for a little piece of the region back home, although that room was the smallest one in the house. I am talking about lavender, resplendent fields of which cover the Rhône-Alpes like the back garden of a potpourri-obsessed god. That might sound like a reason to pack a nosepeg, but a sharp, almost sensual, note, not a sickly one, predominates in the scent of the lavender in the field.

The locals use the stuff for everything, as a specialised museum explains, from treating rheumatism and insomnia to warding off moths, flavouring food, and, more conventionally, making perfume. You might even want to take a little vial of the essential oil in case of scratches if, as I did, you make your next stop the Madeleine Cave in the Ardèche gorges.

You can canoe down this stretch of the Ardèche river, a seam of blue squeezed between the plunging cliffs on either side. It takes two days, with stops along the way to eat and swim and a bivouac overnight in the surrounding national park. La Grotte de la Madeleine (“cave” is the main English translation, but “grotto” conveys more of the atmosphere) is about halfway along.

Bettie was my guide to this stalactite cathedral. “Bettie - but I call myself Colette. I am an artist! An actor!” she shrieked, waving her torch before her like a baton. I paraphrase, for Bettie spoke a French-English hybrid as florid as she herself. With her spiked red hair, leopard-skin leggings and post-cigarette breath, what was this ageing good-time girl doing in a cave?

Perhaps she just liked flicking the switch on the son et lumière show that sent the overwrought opening from Carmina Burana juddering through the main “gallery”, complete with spotlighting straight out of a Rod Stewart revival night. Still, the illumination did present an undeniably dramatic scene: the interior of the cave - in fact formed by the millennially slow sculpting of water - resembling a giant block of butter left to melt and then snap frozen.

Enough, though, of vigorous things (I mean the potholing, not Bettie): the Rhône-Alpes excites epicureans perhaps above all others, and they may find no greater stimulation, of the brain as well as the tongue, than at the Wine University, in the 12th century chateau of Suze la Rousse.

Jacques Avril, in charge of external relations at the university, was insouciant about the threat posed by “new world” wines. “Chile, South Africa - they may enjoy an economy of scale,” he said, pouring me a snifter of a medal-heavy Cotes du Rhone, “but that’s because there are only a few dozen vignerons in the whole country. In France, we have thousands.”

Variety is strength, in other words, and the variegated bunch of winemakers in the region illustrate his point well. It is hard to feel sorry for someone who lives in a chateau, but as Jessy Terrasse, the young wife of the fourth generation owner of the Chateau Rochecolombe, described her dawn-to-dusk working days in the family’s vineyards, I did begin to feel a little tired.

But the toil was worth it if the chateau’s zesty rose was anything to go by. There was everything going on here: this was not so much a bottle you would bring to a party as a party in a bottle.

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