My husband and I did the 'Portraits of Southern France' trip in June. Our only previous experience of river cruising was with Uniworld so we were expecting a lot - we were so disappointed. The ship broke down after a couple of days and we were stuck in a small village for two days, missing some of our tours. Viking did try to find us things to do but one of the tours meant that we were on a tour bus for the majority of the the time in 34C heat with no aircon or toilet - not good.
I have to say that the food on a previous river cruise was excellent and usually represented what was popular in the particular region. Wines were also representative of the various regions - not so on Viking, most nights we were served the same house wine.
We expected that we would be able to sit on deck as we sailed along the rivers (which would have been lovely as the temperatures were so high) but, because the ship was too high to go under the bridges, this was not possible. This was not made clear in the brochure we received, (in fact they said that the top deck was a favourite place for passengers to be ) if it had been we would not have have even considered this particular cruise.