How we did it: running a gite

When Xavier-Gabriel Le Gall was posted to Toulouse from Normandy, his wife Josiane went ahead to look for a place to live. Just outside Carcassonne, she found an abandoned winery that she fancied doing up.

Xavier-Gabriel never made it to that new job. Like Josiane, he fell in love with the winery, turned his back on 28 years as director of centres for young drug addicts, sure only of one thing, that he needed a break.

Since then, they have earned a spot in Sawday guides after converting the workers’ housing and the vathouse into a B&B, a self-catering gite, plus a gîte d’étape - an overnight stopover for groups, be they cyclists or pilgrims on their way along the Santiago de Compostela route.

What qualities do you need to run a gite?

First of all, you need to be able to set out on an adventure. You have to give up your well-organised existence, and the security that goes with it. Then it’s a challenge to exchange a fulfilling intellectual life for one in which you are doing things with your hands.

You don’t miss that intellectual side?

No, I have not stopped thinking. I just think to myself. And we dream of one day creating a residence here for artists and musicians. So that will compensate.

What for you makes a successful gite or B&B?

A place where people want to come back. That can even be immediate, some
people come for one night in our B&B, fall in love with the setting and ask to stay for a week in our self-catering unit.

So it is the setting that's important?

It is, but it is not enough. You have to be interested in people. We both worked with people in the medical world, and relating to people has always been important for us. That has not changed. Each new person that comes is a fresh occasion to share and exchange.

What sort of problems do you encounter?

Mostly material ones - people who thought they were coming to a castle and are disappointed, but it is rare. Also, there is a lot of time-consuming paperwork.

In what ways have you felt the economic crisis?

Later bookings. We have had as many people, but this summer they rang up at the last moment.

Do you have mostly French visitors?

No, we are very international. We get many people from nearby Spain but also from the UK, the Netherlands and, more surprisingly, quite a lot from Quebec and South Africa. People come because here they want to talk about France, French life and culture and politics.

Have you been accepted by the local population?

When you come from Normandy, you are very much a foreigner down here, but once they saw that we had respected the spirit of the place and preserved the spirit of the vathouse - we’ve turned that into a dormitory, and you sleep in the original vats - things changed. When my wife announced that her grandfather was from Carcassonne, that helped. Now they bring us old farm tools and say: "You can put that up on the wall in the vathouse."