Rhône
— the river that drains the south.
Not only on a wall.
“The river runs 813 kilometres from a glacier in the Swiss Alps to the Camargue delta. In France it gathers the Saône at Lyon, broadens through Vienne and Valence, slides past the Palais des Papes at Avignon, and braids into a marsh of flamingos and white horses before it meets the Mediterranean near Port-Saint-Louis. The vineyards on its hillsides have been worked since the Romans.
Rhône, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Rhône rises at the Rhône Glacier in the Swiss canton of Valais, runs the length of Lake Geneva, and crosses into France at the city of Geneva. From there it travels roughly 545 kilometres south through Lyon, where it absorbs the Saône, past Vienne, Valence, Avignon, and Arles, before braiding into the Camargue, a 930-square-kilometre delta of saltpans, marsh, and rice paddy on the Mediterranean coast. The whole river system carries about 1,700 cubic metres per second at its mouth, the largest discharge of any French river.
The Rhône is fed mainly by Alpine snowmelt, which gives it a strong summer-high regime unusual for a Mediterranean river. The Compagnie Nationale du Rhône has managed the French stretch since 1933, building nineteen run-of-river hydro-electric dams between Génissiat and the delta that together supply about a quarter of France's hydropower. The silt the river still carries from the Alps lengthens the Camargue delta seaward by roughly ten metres each year, slowly enough that the gardiens still ride the same pastures their grandfathers worked.
The hillsides above the river have been planted to vines since the Romans worked them in the first century, and the appellation Côtes du Rhône covers about 45,000 hectares of vineyard across six departments. The northern Rhône grows Syrah on granite at Côte-Rôtie and Hermitage; the southern Rhône carries Grenache on the round white stones of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The mistral wind, funneled south down the valley between the Massif Central and the Alps, dries the fruit and keeps the rot off the canopy.