Vineyard Wedding South West France

Come away with us and dream of beautiful French vineyards as we are starting the week with a Vineyard Wedding in South West of France, captured by FWS approved Vendor Claire Penn Photography.

Today’s couple Rachel and Craig have such a perfect blend of style and sass, creating a beautifully chic and stylish wedding that reflected the couples personality and provide fun and laughter for their wedding guests.

Bride Rachel takes us through their love story and big day: “I would love to be able to talk about the great love story that got me and and Mr Holme together, but truth is after 3 years of being friends who definitely didn’t fancy each other I got dared to down a pint of vodka and it all started from there.

In fact the proposal 9 years later at Northcote manor involved copious amounts of wine also. Little known to me when I was trying to get more wine after polishing off one bottle of red wine and a bottle of Louis Roederer. Craig was fretting about me being too drunk to propose and I was fretting about not being drunk enough seen as we were childless for the night.

There was no attachment to France but I had a vision of glorious weather and getting married under a pergola and France provided all this and more. I searched for hours in England and visited several locations and none of them spoke to me like the pictures I had seen of Luxury weddings in France.

When we visited in the October it was dark and cold and the place seemed a little miserable in the autumn/winter, except for the magnificent views that surrounded the property that once was a cognac distillery. Craig struggled to see the vision (as most men do) but I could picture the place in Summer with trailing roses and flowers. I already had my photographer in mind (Claire Penn) and I was capturing the pictures in my mind of dancing and being picked up in my dress in the vineyards, (this was realised although Craig’s emergency hernia operation 3 weeks before the wedding put stop to any romantic slinging over shoulders.)

I had set ideas about what I wanted and made our own guestplan with string and Polaroid pictures taking inspiration from Pinterest. Despite big protests from the mother and traditional thinking members of the family I didn’t want a cake. The thought of stuffing ourselves with cake in hot weather was too much to bear so the macaroons went down a treat.

I bought several wedding magazines but dint have the time to read any. All my inspiration came from online sources and the best decisions of my life was to book Claire Penn and Papertwin wedding videographers who captured our day perfectly and became firm friends in the process linking up as Penn and paper.

Three weeks before the wedding, partly down to my lax wedding organisation (Craig is always better at finalising my ideas) we hadn’t got any wedding favours. That where strange cases came in as they made incredible designed CD’s using pictures from our hand designed wedding invitations that had all mine and Craigs love songs, that were playing at the wedding and that we had coined as “our” songs in the 11 years we had been together. They also chucked some surprises in that the guests had fun with moustaches and hats.

The venue’s wedding planner was like a dream come true to help plan the day. It ran like a military operation and she got in touch with all the suppliers and we had a wonderful folk band with the lead singer Jake Watt, very typically French and created the scene as I walked down the isle also learning 3 songs for us. My dress was everything I wanted from Butterfly bridal, I wanted something I wouldn’t get too hot in and would swish as I danced.