I must confess I have an affection for the wines of the Languedoc. Not the ubiquitous Vin d’Pays wines that line your grocery store shelves. Those wines could be produced anywhere, and taste like it. They aren’t bad, just not unique in any way.
The great wines of the Languedoc — and there are many — first captured my imagination while I was judging several years ago at the Concours Mondial, one of Europe’s largest and most prestigous wine competitions.
This is a blind tasting. The judges know virtually nothing about the wines before them. Not the producer. Not the type of wine. Not the origin of the grapes. Nothing.
During the course of the tastings, which go on over several days, I had a run of five straight red wines that I scored at the gold medal level. I was blown away by the beauty and finesse of those wines and couldn’t wait until the end of the day, when the wines judged would be revealed.
They were all from La Clape, a sub-region of the Coteaux du Languedoc. I was unfamiliar with this wine region and immediately scheduled a visit to the south of France to investigate these phenomenal wines.
La Clape, I discovered, was very popular in the United Kingdom because the quality was extremely high and the cost very low. The same was true of other districts I visited in the Languedoc, such as Saint Chinian and Pic Saint Loup.
I came across the great wines of Mas Jullien. The amazing quality I found throughout the AOC regions of the Languedoc were a revelation.
The Languedoc recently revised its classifications, keeping the Vin d’Pays and the AOC designations while adding Grand Vins and Grand Crus distinctions that are intended to delineate the highest quality wines of the region.
I tasted many of these wines in their new classifications recently in New York. The video here was taken by members of the Benson Marketing Group, who organized the tasting and conducted an interview with me to elicit my impressions of the wines and the new classification system.
I hope you find it informative and useful, and entertaining, too.
8