“All right, let's have some fun.”

That's never a bad suggestion. But when it comes from the sommelier at Manoir Hovey in Quebec's Eastern Townships, it sounds even better. My wife Kay and I had arrived at the Manoir late on a Sunday afternoon, after a few hours' ramble from our home in Vermont. As always when we make the trip, we had the feeling of not only having crossed an international boundary, but of having eased into a shire gorgeous and gracious even by the standards of our own corner of the world. It is our corner of the world, if you forget about the border patrol. But yet it isn't -- as witness the legions of New Englanders who have no idea where it is.

The Eastern Townships (Estrie is the less prosaic French name for the region) is the wedge of territory lying due north of Vermont and New Hampshire, bordered on the east by Maine and on the west by the flat rich bottomlands of the Richelieu River valley. The Townships' northern limits are less precise, unless your authority is one of the Tourism Quebec maps that divide the province into neat little sectors; and on the south, the U.S. border seems less of an arbitrary demarcation than such political boundaries usually are. Northernmost New England, at least outside of the Lake Champlain valley, is rugged, heavily forested terrain; the straggling towns that hug the border often have the rough-edged frontier feeling of places settled far later than they really were. The Townships are a different matter, and a tremendous surprise for travelers who check through the border crossings expecting an increasingly hardscrabble environment. At its finest, the landscape here looks as if it might have been designed by Capability Brown on a particularly good day -- assuming he had plenty of rolling hills, apple trees, and sparkling lakes to work with.

What the people of the Townships also have to work with, as we discovered on this trip more than any we'd taken here before, is wonderful natural provender. It's possible to eat and drink in this corner of Quebec as well as anywhere, and, more and more, the ingredients are locally grown.

North Hatley stands at the northern tip of the most beautiful lake in the Townships. Eight-mile-long, comma-shaped Lake Massawippi is narrow and deep, its steep banks rimmed by forest and farmland. Manoir Hovey runs cruises on a 22-foot, mirror-polished, antique wooden motor launch, which looks perfectly at home on Massawippi. It's that sort of lake.

There isn't all that much to North Hatley -- a downtown brew pub, a skein of good shops and galleries, a summer theater, a few B&Bs and a pretty little bandshell capping a promenade along the water. And, given the setting, there isn't much more you could want.

Like much of the Townships, the village and environs were settled by American Loyalists fleeing the triumphant Revolution. The French who settled the St. Lawrence valley in the 1600s gave the future Townships a wide berth, as the territory was still prone to Indian attacks; in fact, the area was primarily Anglophone until the latter half of the 19th century. Even today, there are pockets in which English predominates, and the tallest spire in a village might well be Anglican rather than Roman Catholic. It is Quebec mixed with a bit of New England.

The fact that it quite definitely isn't New England, though, inspired a particular trend in summer rustication in the Townships, especially around North Hatley. Even before the Civil War, wealthy southern planters traveled to the region to get away from their sweltering summers. After the war, the trend continued -- so determined were the ex-Confederates not to have anything to do with New England that, according to some accounts, they kept their shades pulled down until the despised Yankee domain had slipped behind them.

We don't know whether Atlanta utility magnate Henry Atkinson had so bad an aftertaste of General Sherman that he kept the shades drawn until he reached the border, but we do know that he liked North Hatley enough to build a splendid summer mansion just south of town, on the east shore of Lake Massawippi, in 1900. That's today's Manoir Hovey, the largest and most resort-like of three grand inns that grace the lake (the others are the Auberge Hatley, a bit closer to town, and the Ripplecove, in Ayer's Cliff at the southern end of the lake -- more about them in a future issue of naturaltraveler.com.

Manoir Hovey put us in mind of the luxurious small retreats you find on the Swiss lakes -- Geneva, of course, or smaller lakes such as the Thunersee or Brienzersee. The main house and outbuildings are tucked directly along a 1700-foot private shoreline, with room for a pool, tennis courts, formal gardens; and docks for canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats (in winter, skating and ice fishing take over, and there are cross-country ski trails). No two of the 40 guest rooms and suites are alike; plush fabrics, lace, and wallpaper prints of an almost three-dimensional richness set the tone, and many of the rooms have wood-burning fireplaces.

We were shown to our “Treetops” suite by innkeeper Steve Stafford, who told us we had the option of driving down to dinner -- or taking a flight of outdoor stairs. The stairs were there because Treetops lives up to its name: our quarters occupied half of a separate lodge perched a hundred feet above the main complex, with views from our private deck that laced a wide swath of Massawippi with the branches of lofty birches and maples. Steve told us that earlier in the year, Nicole Kidman had stayed in Treetops while filming “The Human Stain” nearby.

“We had security people out on the lake, to keep away the paparazzi,” Steve said. “And one fellow, with a heavy French-Canadian accent, called to say that he was Tom Cruise, that he and Nicole were reconciling, and could he please have the adjoining suite!”

As handsome as our accommodations were at Manoir Hovey, we were drawn well before dinner to the public rooms, in particular a sumptuously baronial stone-fireplaced library that looks as if Henry Atkinson had just stepped out for a stroll in the gardens (his name, in fact, is still written on the flyleaves of many of the books in the room). It was the perfect spot for looking out on the lake, and for enjoying a Cinzano with a twist before dinner. We held off on our accustomed martinis; there was serious business ahead in the dining room across the hall.

This was the business, of course, of having some fun, under the guidance of our sommelier. Steven Monfette is an immensely knowledgeable young man who has spent the past five years looking after the Manoir Hovey's cellars, with a not inconsiderable sideline in cheese. His enthusiasm for his subject is such that if he loved algebra as much as he does wine, he could make you order a bottle of quadratic equations.

“Quebec wines,” we had said to him. “And from the Townships, as much as possible.”

As soon as he had our first course order -- for Kay, sautéed livers of pheasant and guinea fowl, and for me filet of sea bream in a veal glaze on a bed of local chanterelles -- Stephen made his proposal for the beginning of the evening's fun. He poured us glasses of a dry, subtle white called Storiken Gold, from the winery of Dietrich Joos -- not in the Townships, but just to the west -- with subdued fruit notes harmonizing with vanilla and a faint touch of oak. I thought of what it might do for a fresh ripe apricot on a hot afternoon ... not that the bream or the game bird livers weren't themselves a perfect match.

“When it comes to reds, with our short growing season this is perhaps the best we can do in Quebec,” Stephen told us as he opened a bottle of La Vielle Grange (The Old Barn) from a Townships vineyard, Les Blancs Coteaux.

Light in body and color, and with an elusive hint of strawberry, the wine stood up more than serviceably well to our entrees – Kay's potato-crusted Alberta beef tenderloin with onion confit, and my herb-crusted pork tenderloin with cheese gnocchi. And it was those gnocchi that were the touchstone for our next Eastern Townships food epiphany -- the local cheese. They were made with a decent approximation of gruyere called Le Moine –appropriately so, because Le Moine means “the monk,” and this and many other cheeses are made by the Benedictines of the Abbey of Saint-Benoit-du-Lac, which looms above nearby Lake Memphremagog.

The cheese cart at Manoir Hovey is the palette for Steven Monfette's other passion -- and, as with the wine, we asked him to focus on cheeses of Quebec, and in particular the Townships, as much as possible. He left us with several, the standouts among which were a chevre noir, a two-years-aged, subtle and slightly grainy goat cheddar; and a brie-like cheese called Mi Careme , that possessed a pleasing faint bitterness that I imagined tasting like the Quebec earth itself.

Stephen had one last treat for us, to accompany our desserts of warm almond-tangerine tartlets. “Ice cider,” he announced. “A Quebec invention.”

I was familiar with ice wine, the German specialty lately adopted with tremendous success by Ontario vintners; the idea is to press the juice from grapes frozen on the vines. And here was the apple equivalent – mildly alcoholic, served cold, with a sweetness not of sugar but of nectary appleness itself. It capped the evening better than cognac.

The postprandial climb to our Treetops aerie seemed especially daunting, but we were up early the next day to visit the source of the cheddar in the gnocchi. But that puts gastronomy before matters of the spirit (there's a very blurry line there), because the main attraction at that hour was attendance at lauds, one of the canonical hours at which the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Saint-Benoit (Benedict) raise their voices in chant.

I've never seen monks pick a bad location, but they outdid themselves at Saint-Benoit. Memphremagog is the largest of the Eastern Township lakes -- it is, in fact, an international lake, with the southernmost three or four miles of its more than 30-mile length anchored on the Vermont side of the border. The abbey stands on high ground along the western fork of the lake, surrounded by forest, meadows, and its own apple orchards. The monks have been here for more than 90 years.

The monastery they built in 1941 is geometric Romanesque, grey stone with a copper roof and a bell tower that must surely be the highest point on the Memphremagog shoreline. Entering at the guest portal, we walked down a long hallway finished in a riot of polychrome glazed bricks -- it looked as if the Lego branch of the Benedictines had been turned loose on the place. The church at the end of the hall is an entirely different matter, though. Added to the main structure only 10 years ago, it is a study in perpendicular minimalism, pale grey and severe, with its steel skeleton showing; still, the overall feeling is of serenity rather than starkness. One wall is dominated by an organ, its pipes and blond wooden casing reaching to the rafters. The brother organist came into the nave from the opposite side, his black soutane skimming the floor, and began to play at precisely 7:30, the hour of lauds. And as he drew his plain meditative chords from the instrument, the rest of the community filed in and took their places in facing pews. There were about 40 monks in all.

The chant of Benedictines at their canonical hours sounds like what it is: the unhurried and perfected voice of an idea that has existed for 1500 years. No human arrangement is that old, except for a handful of nations, the great religions themselves (most of them), and the order that lives by the rule of St. Benedict. The liturgy lasted half an hour, and apart from a few intervals of spoken text it consisted entirely of stately, single-part chant accompanied by the underlining chords, touched with mysterious simplicity, of the organ.

Visitors come to Saint-Benoit for the liturgy of the hours (there are matins at 5 a.m., Eucharist at 11 a.m., Sext at noon, vespers at 5 p.m., and compline at 7:45 p.m.), and for Sunday Mass; but they also make the trip to shop. Along with tapes and CDs of chant, and religious articles and books, the monks stock a spacious store beneath the abbey with the good things they make. The surrounding orchards yield dry and sweet sparkling ciders, hard and soft, and there are apple sauce and juice, cider vinegar, and maple syrup and sugar. But the signature product of Staint-Benoit is cheese.

We weren't able to visit the abbey's cheesemakers at work -- our request was politely but firmly turned down, either because of provincial health regulations or a monastic rule -- I wasn't sure. But the display in the shop was enough to convince us to return one day with a cooler. Here was the rich nutty Le Moine that had done so much for my gnocchi at Manoir Hovey, along with soft aged, sheep's milk cheese, fontina, and hard ricotta. Of the 10 cheeses the monks produce, though, we were most eager to try their famous blues. There are two – L'Ermite, produced at the abbey since 1943, and Bleu Bénédictin, a somewhat firmer cheese made with Roquefort penicillin that was our favorite. We didn't need a cooler for the Saint-Benoit blues; neither survived l'heure aperitif that evening.

Leaving this quiet realm of chant and cheese, we drove north along the west shore of Lake Memphremagog to Magog, a lively little city that grew up in the days of when steamboats met railroads here at the lake's northern tip. Like other progressive towns fortunate enough to have a lakefront, Magog has transformed its old workaday waterfront into promenades, bike paths, and marinas; the main downtown street is all bistros, galleries, and boutiques, and the requisite brew pub stands down near where the Magog River flows into the lake. We made a note to return to Magog in September, when the waterfront park is home to the Magog-Orford Grape Harvest Festival -- one of the Quebec wine industry's biggest events, with dozens of tasting booths and an impressive array of the province's artisan foods.

Our inn that night was practically an artisan food festival in itself. Throughout Quebec, there are 30 small auberges sharing a concept called Table Champetre -- roughly translated, “table of the countryside.” Aux Jardins Champetres, just south of Magog, is a roadside B&B that typifies the genre. As our hostess Monique Dubuc showed us to our small, cheerful room, we had a feeling of arriving at a farmhouse in which all energies are being directed to the preparation of a big special meal. A girl sorted strawberries at a table in the dining room; Monique herself had been busy in the kitchen. But this was no holiday dinner at a country aunt's place. Night after night, a wonderful six-course meal is the main attraction at Aux Jardins Champetre. Patrons bring their own wine – that's part of the provincial rules under which the Table Champetre establishments operate -- and Monique outdoes herself with the local provender.

“The original idea behind Table Champetre was that each proprietor had to produce 60% of their ingredients on their premises,” Monique explained as we were shown to our table in a big, homey room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking both a swimming pool and the meanderings of free-range chickens. “But that was difficult and would have eliminated many of the participants, so now the province only requires that each of us picks one main thing to grow. I chose ducks, Barbary ducks.”

And, indeed, it is the Dubuc ducks that show up most prominently on the menu -- along with vegetables and strawberries grown on the property, and lamb from nearby farms. That night, we enjoyed duck confit in a balsamic-dressed salad, leek tarts made with the monks' fine approximation of gruyere, and braised duck with prunes and cognac.

Ballasted with a breakfast of homemade croissants and pear-almond spread, and big fluffy omelets crafted of fresh-laid eggs and Saint-Benoit cheese, we headed west through farms and forests to an Eastern Townships village where ducks have attained an almost totemic prominence.

When I first discovered Knowlton, a gentrified crossroads town on a pretty millpond just south of Brome Lake, I figured the local obsession with ducks had something to do with the culinary repute of the lake's wild denizens. Later, seeing that duck was on every local menu (there's even a small restaurant that serves hardly anything but) and even in cartoon form on signs and storefronts, I assumed that the lakeshore was dotted with Mom-and-Pop duck farms. It turns out that ducks are a much bigger business in Knowlton: A company called Les Canards du Lac Brome has grown, since 1912, into the largest duck supplier in Canada; its white Pekin ducks are raised in a compound on the outskirts of town, and its retail shop offers a dizzying (daffying?) array of products that suggests a duck version of the famous shrimp litany in “Forrest Gump”: whole ducks, duck livers, duck souvlaki, duck sausage, duck confit, duck pot pie, duck turnovers . . . and smoked magret of duck, a sort of duck prosciutto in consistency if not in saltiness.

Slices of magret wrapped nicely around a mouselline of scallops at the beginning of dinner on our evening in Knowlton. We were staying at the Auberge Knowlton, a spiffily-restored hostelry dating to stagecoach days at the town's main intersection, but were dining a few blocks away at the Lakeview Inn.

Both establishments are unlikely survivors. Prior to its revival under new owners in 1997, the Auberge Knowlton seemed ready to end its century-and-a-half run under the wrecker's ball, while the Lakeview, prior to 1986, seemed as if it wouldn't even need that much help to achieve oblivion.

“When I bought the place, it was ready to collapse into its foundation,” says Montreal businessman Ron Blair, who took on what many thought was the hopeless task of saving the 1874 hotel (in those days, it did have a lake view, but houses now intervene between the property and the Brome shoreline). “The basement had filled completely with water, which froze each winter and pushed the foundation walls apart. The building couldn't have lasted much longer.”

As we joined Ron and his wife Diane for dinner, he told us about the challenges involved in saving as much of the original structure as possible, right down to the ornate pressed tin ceilings. Taking our seats in the Lakeview's formal Victorian dining room, we found it hard to imagine that the place had ever been as much of a wreck as Ron described -- he had been as meticulous in its reconstruction as with the assembly of his sumptuous wine list. This evening, we strayed from Quebec wines and stuck with Chiantis, wanting big as a companion to Kay's fresh rosemary-infused rack of lamb and the heroic veal chop (oddly called a “cutlet” on the menu) which I had ordered. Both entrées were from local suppliers -- ducks don't rule completely in this part of the world -- and both followed the silky, magret-wrapped scallop mousselline, and lobster bisque with a bracing touch of cognac. Over Calvados afterward (and after a wonderful goat cheese from northern Quebec whose colloquial name inexplicably translates as “Don't shoot the messenger”), we congratulated Ron on not letting the Lakeview fall into its foundations -- and promised to return for one of his big Sunday brunches.

Before heading back home, there were two stops we wanted to make. Ever since dinner that first night at Manoir Hovey, we'd been curious about the sources of our main-course wine and the ice cider that had been such an unexpected delight at dessert. Our search for the winery Les Blancs Coteaux took us to the western reaches of the Townships, where the rolling countryside gives way to the great open vistas that presage the Richelieu valley. Most of the region's wineries are located here, where temperatures are relatively more moderate from autumn through spring, and in the even flatter Montregie territory to the west.

Les Blanc Couteaux turned out to be a modest operation of some 87 acres, about a third planted in vines. “It's a family affair,” I was told by Claire Dubé, who with her sister, brothers, and in-laws has run the 14-year-old winery for a little over a year. “Like everyone else in Quebec, we grow a lot of Seyval Blanc -- for our whites, which we offer aged either in steel or in oak. And we've planted several varieties, like Frontenac and Sabrevois that were developed in Minnesota for their winter hardiness.”

The Minnesota hybrids, Claire explained as we walked past intense blue bunches of ripening Frontenac grapes, have the advantage of not having to be buried in winter: I had talked with several other Quebec vintners who described the laborious business of covering the pruned vines with soil each autumn, so they would be insulated against bitter winter temperatures, and of digging them out by hand in the spring.

“Look at these,” she beamed, cradling a bunch of Frontenacs. “Only their third year -- can you imagine in two more years?”

Certainly, the stony soil that had frustrated generations of dairy farmers was kind to grapes in this part of the Townships. Those plump Frontenacs, along with Marechal Foch and St. Croix grapes from nearby vineyards, would be going into next year's bottles of La Vielle Grange -- and into more good meals at Auberge Hatley and beyond.

From the vineyard, we followed the loneliest of back roads, cutting east and south towards the border. We knew we had found our next and last stop before we saw any sign, because the random woods had given way to neat phalanxes of apple trees. Just ahead was Domaine Pinnacle, named for the dark abrupt knob of a mountain in whose shadow it lies. It is where ice cider is made.

Charlie Crawford is a native Montrealer, whose search for a second career after success as a software entrepreneur led him to this 70-year-old orchard and 150-year-old house with its cross-border view of Jay Peak and Vermont's Missisquoi valley. “Apples are a crop without a terribly high profit margin,” Charlie told us as we sat in an office whose main furnishings were a weight machine and a sleek road bike. “We wanted to create a value-added product, and ice cider was the perfect answer.”

The key ingredient -- along with thousands of Macintosh and Spartan trees, and a secret trove of heirloom varieties -- is the expertise of Christian Barthomeuf, the Quebecker who in 1989 perfected the ice cider method and who supervises production at both Pinnacle and La Face Cacheé, a smaller competitor.

“We pick the apples after they've been on the tree through several frosts,” Charlie explained. “We store them frozen, and press in December and January. Then the concentrated apple liquor is drawn off and fermented for seven months. It takes about 12 pounds of apples to make a 375 milliliter bottle.” That's adding value, by anyone's standards – and adding something incalculable to the enjoyment of dishes as divergent as foie gras and those almond-tangerine tartlets at Manoir Hovey. It also adds a feather to Quebec's culinary cap, for nowhere else in the world is ice cider produced.

And nowhere else but in North America but in the Eastern Townships, we decided as the border station loomed, were so many good things to eat and drink concentrated, like the nectar of apples or the milk of Benedictine cattle, on such a plump green patch of land.

Bill Scheller is a contributing editor with Islands magazine, and a regular contributor to naturaltraveler.com. He and his wife, Kay, were responsible for revisions to the most recent edition of the “Insight Guide to New England”; together, they are the authors of the New York and New Jersey volumes in Globe Pequot Press's “Off the Beaten Path” series, and of “Best Vermont Drives and Best New Hampshire Drives,” published under their own Jasper Heights Press imprint.

»If You Go: Quebec's Eastern Townships
	Travelers' Information, including maps showing locations of wineries, cheesemakers, and other artisan food producers, is available from Eastern Townships Tourism, 20 Don-Bosco Street South, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada J1L 1W4; (819) 820-2020 0r 800-355-5755; www.easterntownships.cc Manoir Hovey: C.P. 60, North Hatley, Quebec, Canada J0B 2C0; 800-661-2421; www.manoirhovey.com Aux Jardins Champetre, 1575 chemin des Peres, Magog, Quebec J1X 5R9; 819-868-0665 or toll free 877-868-0665; www.auxjardinschampetres.com Auberge Knowlton, 286 chemin de Knowlton, Knowlton, Quebec, Canada J0E 1V0; 450-242-6886; www.cclacbrome.qc.ca\ak Lakeview Inn, 50 rue Victoria, Knowlton, Ville de Lac Brome, Quebec, Canada J0E 1V0; 450-243-6183; www.aubergelakeviewinn.com Abbey of St. Benoit-du-Lac, Saint-Benoit-du-Lac, Quebec, Canada J0B 2M0; 819-843-4080; www.st-benoit-du-lac.com Les Blancs Couteau Winery, 1046 Rte. 202, Dunham, Quebec, Canada J0E 1M0; 450-295-3503. Domaine Pinnacle, 150 chemin Richford, Frelighsburg, Quebec, Canada J0J 1C0; 450-298-1222; www.icecider.com -- Bill Scheller

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