Postcards from a good life in France: "We'll Always Have Paris ... and Provence"

For close to three decades, Patricia and Walter Wells have been fixtures of the American expat scene in Paris, Patricia as an acclaimed expert in French cooking and restaurant reviewer for the International Herald Tribune, Walter as a senior editor at this newspaper, finally retiring as its executive editor in 2005.

Since 1984, though, they have also had another - less visible, more bucolic - life in Provence, where they transformed a run-down stone farmhouse into a dream hideaway with its own vineyard. It is there that Patricia, who first made her name with "The Food Lover's Guide to Paris," gives weeklong cooking classes from May to September (she also gives three or four each winter in Paris).