Taste the Earth: Following the Seasons Through Global Culinary Retreats
Sian Pages – Travel Planner
There is a particular kind of traveller who doesn’t chase destinations — they follow rhythm. The rhythm of ripening. Of harvest. Of the fleeting perfection found only at a certain latitude, in a certain week, beneath a certain tree.
For these travellers, time is not a schedule; it is a season.
They don’t just want to eat well. They want to understand the land.
These are not culinary experiences designed to impress, but to ground. To taste the earth — slowly, reverently, and in season.
1. Autumn in Piedmont – The Truffle Hunt Begins
In the misty forests of northern Italy, the white truffle emerges like a secret whispered by the earth.
Each year, in late October and November, Piedmont becomes a pilgrimage for those who seek this rare treasure.
At family-run estates near Alba, guests are invited to follow trained Lagotto dogs into the woods at dawn. The air is damp, rich with decay and potential. Later, under vaulted stone ceilings, that same truffle will be shaved over hand-cut tajarin pasta and paired with Barolo from the vineyard just beyond the window.
This is not food. It’s inheritance.
2. Sakura Season in Kyoto – The Ephemeral Table
In Japan, cherry blossom season isn’t merely beautiful. It’s instructive.
The sakura bloom is brief — and therefore precious.
At kaiseki ryōris across Kyoto, seasonal ingredients are elevated to poetry: bamboo shoots, delicate mountain herbs, early spring greens. Served in minimalist ceramic-ware, each course feels composed rather than plated.
You eat in near silence, surrounded by the soft rustle of petals falling.
The meal is a meditation on impermanence — a reminder to savour not just the food, but the moment.
3. Summer Foraging in the Faroe Islands – Wild, Raw, Alive
On the edge of the North Atlantic, the Faroe Islands offer something almost pre-modern: a cuisine born not of abundance, but adaptation.
Here, summer brings edible seaweeds, wild sorrel, and seabirds’ eggs nestled into cliffside crevices.
At Koks, the acclaimed remote restaurant accessible by 4×4 and then rowboat, each course is a dialogue between nature and necessity. Fermented lamb, dried fish, and locally foraged herbs come together in combinations that are startling and primal.
Every bite is a landscape.
4. Olive Harvest in Andalusia – The Liquid Gold of November
In southern Spain, the olive harvest begins just as the air shifts and the hills blush gold.
At centuries-old fincas near Jaén or Ronda, guests can walk the groves at sunrise, watching the nets fill with fruit. The olives are cold-pressed within hours — green, peppery, alive.
Cooking classes turn into long lunches on sun-warmed terraces, where everything on the table has a name and a season.
The pace is slow. The hands are stained. The oil is new.
5. Spring in the South of France – A Market in Full Bloom
There is no need for ceremony in Provence — just a basket and the patience to wander.
Spring markets in towns like Apt or Saint-Rémy are fragrant with wild garlic, white asparagus, early strawberries, and goats’ cheese still warm.
You might be staying at a restored farmhouse, where a local chef offers no menu — just what they found that morning. Meals unfold outdoors, under plane trees.
There is no rush. Only rosé, sunlight, and food that speaks the dialect of the land.
Food as Geography. Season as Guide.
To taste a place is to know it more intimately than sightseeing ever allows. These experiences don’t begin in kitchens — they begin in soil, sea, and weather.
And they remind us: the most exquisite meals are not defined by technique or presentation, but by proximity. Proximity to the earth. To the season. To the now.
Because the true connoisseur does not simply seek flavour. They seek origin.
Get in touch
If you’d like to discuss future travel plans you have in mind, get in contact with our in-house travel consultant, Sian Pages, on sian.pages@notjusttravel.com.
Sian will be more than happy to spend time talking you through your options; remembering her service is delivered at no cost to clients and professional connections of Longhurst.
Happy Adventures!
