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"You shouldn’t drink any more water for a few hours," cautions my amiable host Guy as he refills my wine glass with the fine local white. I’m part of a group of revellers enjoying a night-time fondue party at a mountain restaurant which will be followed by a torch-lit ski back down the valley.

We’re at the now-deserted Bretaye ski station at 1,806 metres, high above the picturesque village of Villars in the Swiss Alps. The wooden interior of the chalet glows invitingly in the soft candlelight. A local band plays bucolic folk songs traditionally sung by farmers moving their cattle on nearby pastures. Flurries of snow drift down gently outside our windows, through which we can just make out the dark silhouettes of the surrounding peaks.

Guy’s advice on drinking wine rather than water is to do with helping digest the cheese in the fondue. The pleasant side effects of the alcohol are accepted gratefully, although I later struggle badly trying to balance on one leg for long enough to snap on my skis.

Our torches ablaze, we cautiously snake our way down the thankfully tame upper section of the run back to Villars. Our unruly torches soon burn energetically down to the handle, giving us the appearance of light sabre-wielding characters from a "Star Wars" film. Our shrieks and raucous laughter ring out across the empty mountain but there is no-one to disturb apart from the chamois and bouquetin goats.

Villars perches on a south-facing balcony overlooking the Rhone valley. Very much the picture postcard idyll of the Swiss mountain village, chalet-style buildings predominate, towered over by an amphitheatre of lofty peaks, their lower slopes carpeted in thick conifer forests.

The rattling mountain railway which carries you up to the village is a charming way to arrive. The same railway also provides the main access to the skiing, when its stately progress is less welcome to keen skiers impatient to reach the slopes.

Villars has a reputation as a family resort: wide, well-groomed, non-terrifying pistes. But don’t be fooled by this and its sleepy, chocolate box image. Although lacking the concentration of "killer" black runs of resorts such as Zermatt and Verbier, Villars offers its own variety of interesting and challenging skiing.

As if to illustrate the point, Villars has become the adopted ski resort of several Formula One racing stars, whose aren’t known for tolerating life in the slow lane. David Coulthard and Jacques Villeneuve own chalets here and Damon Hill is also a regular visitor. Each January, Villeneuve and Hill’s Grand Prix Formula Charity, a 24 hour skiathon (borrowing more from Le Mans than F1), raises large sums for local and international charities.

The Formula Charity ski event centres on Bretaye, which provides well-linked standard issue skiing, mostly for beginners and intermediates. But the area’s most interesting and charming skiing is found towards its outer margins. Pistes of varying levels of difficulty descend from Les Chaux to La Rasse as well as a longer run all the way down to Barboleuse in the valley, apparently one of Villeneuve’s favourite descents.

One of the best runs in Villars is the long descent from Le Meilleret to the neighbouring village of Les Diablerets, above which soars the glacier Villars shares with glitzy Gstaad. The run is totally distorted by the standard piste map which compresses the 3km run out of all recognition and even suggests the last section is uphill! Relying on the map alone, the run (actually two overlapping pistes capable of being skied separately) might seem a lot of effort to reach for very little reward. In reality, the descent is long, varied and very scenic, particularly its lower wooded sections.

I can’t help suspecting the piste map misrepresentation is to an extent deliberate. You can’t blame Villars locals for wanting to keep a good thing to themselves. And the Meilleret descent is a very good thing. I wonder if it might be possible to ski this run after dark? Guy, I think we’ll be needing some longer candles.

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