Oingt looks as though someone has poured honey over a hill. The village stands at the heart of the Pierres Dorées, the Golden Stones country of southern Beaujolais, and its houses are built of a limestone coloured by iron into every shade from butter to rust. Steep cobbled lanes wind up toward a medieval tower and a church, and the whole place is on the list of France's most beautiful villages, a title that here feels earned rather than marketed.
It is also a very small place, and the nearest town with real services is Gleizé, just beside Villefranche-sur-Saône, around ten kilometres away. Theizé, a smaller twin among the vineyards, is closer. So arrive with a full tank, and plan lunch in advance on weekdays, when some of the village's few restaurants are shut. Parking lies outside the walls, and the lanes inside are for feet. Wear boots rather than slick soles, since the stones are smooth and often damp.
Oingt has a literary footnote. Marguerite d'Oingt, born in the village in the thirteenth century, became a Carthusian prioress and wrote some of the earliest known mystical texts in the Franco-Provençal language, a quiet voice from a world of stone and candlelight. From the old tower the view runs across vineyards and orchards toward the Monts du Lyonnais, and on a clear day the Alps hang pale on the eastern horizon.
The roads around the village are some of the nicest in the region. Narrow, winding and well maintained, they loop through gamay vines and cherry orchards, past farmhouses with golden walls and terracotta roofs, and the corners are tight enough to be fun without ever being savage. In spring the hillsides are pink and white with blossom, and in autumn they turn red and gold, the colours of the stone repeated in the leaves. Wine is the thing here: Beaujolais, of course, made from gamay, and often drunk young and a little cool, which suits a warm afternoon on a terrace. It is a good place to begin a day, or to end one with a glass.