Which qualities make an autumn destination particularly attractive?

Autumn's first quality is edible: it is the northern hemisphere's harvest hinge, and destinations with a harvest to celebrate out-cook their own summers. The grape harvest (vendange, vendemmia, vendimia) runs September–October with its festivals and cellar doors open; the white-truffle season crowns Piedmont (Alba's international fair has run since the late 1920s, October–November); olive oil turns nouveau in November; mushroom seasons open under local permit systems (many Italian communes license picking by the day — the permit office is itself a piece of local theater); and the game and chestnut and new-wine menus (Austria's Sturm, Germany's Federweißer, Beaujolais Nouveau's third-Thursday-of-November ritual) exist only in these weeks. A food traveler's autumn is not a season; it is a supply chain at flood tide.

The second quality is optical. The foliage calendars are managed like bloom seasons (Japan's meteorological services track the momiji front descending from Hokkaido in October to Kyoto in late November; New England's states publish peak-foliage maps through October), and the low sun lengthens the golden hours that photographers plan around — at mid-latitudes the autumn light runs raking and warm for a larger share of the day than summer allows. Third, the spectacles of movement: the raptor and crane migrations funnel through the straits (Gibraltar and the Bosphorus run August–October; Falsterbo in Sweden counts millions of departing birds), and the deer rut and the grape harvest's dawn mists give the countryside a drama summer never schedules. Fourth, the civic dividend: cities have their people back — theatres open their seasons, universities fill the cafés, the restaurants that closed in August are cooking — while prices remain at shoulder levels except where a festival (Oktoberfest, note, is mostly a September event, ending in early October) spikes its own fortnight. Choose an autumn destination by naming which 1 of the 4 qualities you are traveling for, and pick the place that maximises that one: Alba for the table, Kyoto for the leaf, the straits for the sky, Vienna for the city restored.

A Piedmont hillside at dawn in October: mist in the folds, pickers already in the rows, and somewhere below a village kitchen starting the day's bagna cauda — autumn you can smell before you see it.

Autumn's calendar contains a fraud and a gift that both reward checking: the fraud is the "foliage festival" scheduled by a fixed date in a warming climate (peaks have drifted later by days to weeks in many regions — trust the year's foliage reports, not the festival's founding date); the gift is the second spring of the Mediterranean, when October rains green the summer-burnt hills of Greece, Spain and Sicily and the sea is still warm — the locals' own favorite fortnight, hiding inside the season tourists have gone home from.

• Name your quality — Table, leaf, sky or city: the destination follows from the choice, not the reverse
• Live reports over fixed dates — Foliage and harvest timing read from this year's trackers in the final fortnight
• Festival fortnights priced separately — Oktoberfest-scale spikes checked before assuming shoulder prices

Autumn's pleasures are perishable, and its conditions change faster than its reputation suggests. The harvest is a working season first: estates and farms are at their busiest, so cellar doors, truffle markets and farm kitchens run restricted hours or close to casual visitors for the weeks the crop is coming in, and the famous fairs price their own fortnight accordingly. Foliage is the second gamble, because peak color has drifted later by days to weeks in many regions, which means a festival fixed by date can now run a fortnight ahead of the trees it was named for. The third complication is the weather nobody packs for. Autumn countryside is wet and cool rather than cold, which is the exact combination that produces non-freezing cold injury, and water that still looks swimmable is not — immersion in cold water can make swimming impossible within 10 minutes. If hands or feet do get into trouble, the published rewarming range is water at 98.6°F to 102.2°F (37°C to 39°C) with ibuprofen at 400 milligrams twice daily, which is worth knowing before a day of mushroom hunting or a dawn in a vineyard turns into a long walk back.

Pick your one quality, then choose the destination whose calendar serves it this year — and book the harvest table or the foliage ryokan before the flights.