I have just returned from a trip to the Languedoc region in southern France, and I am confused. I have read that the region, which derives its name from Langue d’Oc, or language of the Occitaine, is fiercely independent, with a separate Occitaine identity.
I see evidence of this graffiti’d on walls in tiny villages, slogans calling for independence with the same insistence as the separatists in the nearby Basque region of Spain; I look for that spirit in each bottle of wine.
I hear reports of soigné wine bars in Paris pouring tiny production boutique Minervois made from ancient Carignane vines, and I see terraced vineyards set in such unviable places that it hardly seems possible, much less cost-effective, to harvest them.
I taste wines that seem to have an almost Spanish or Australian largesse to them, big-shouldered, rich and juicy, quite irresistible, and quite unlike most of the wine in France. And at the same time I can buy AOC wines for next to nothing. And everywhere there are vineyards, offering easy evidence of France’s wine glut, which is said to originate here.
But wineries like Comte Cathar and Domaine d’Aupilhac and Mas de Daumas Gassac have proven that great wine can be made here. But where, and how?
The Languedoc is a huge, diverse place, capable of multiple expressions. It’s a geological tumble, bearing influences from the great Pyrenean uplift, and from the uplift that defines the center of France, the Massif Central; it has borne millions of years of hydrokinetic forces pulling soil and rock and deposits from these mountains to the Mediterranean Sea; and then there is the sea itself, which once covered much of the region, leaving behind its own marine deposits. It contains schist, limestone, granitic, and alluvial soils, sometimes in the same vineyard; it represents a geology that in its way is as complex as Burgundy.
But it is quite a bit hotter, and much much poorer. Unemployment runs as much as twenty-five percent and higher in some areas, and growing grapes remains the best option among few for an impoverished region. Plantings here are somewhat less than strategic, since economic necessity drives most decisions here — considerations of quality often run a distant second.
The net result is that the region makes far more wine than anyone can consume. Driving around the Coteaux de Languedoc I encountered vineyard tracts in the thousands of hectares, rivaling and probably surpassing the vast carpets of vines in Monterey and in the Central Coast of California.
And there are new plantings, even with a surplus in the hundreds of thousands of gallons, so much that a percentage must be disposed of each year to make room for the next vintage — much of this, it’s said, is being converted to ethanol.
During my week’s tour of the region I tasted a number of drinkable, ordinary, astonishingly cheap wines — two or three Euros for an AOC. bottling. Rustic is a word that’s often used to describe these wines, but it’s a word that might as well mean overcropped, inattentively farmed, made by way of faulty, if traditional, practices. You can taste the cut corners in these wines.
But the region has never lacked for potential, and much of the excitement and some of the controversy surrounds the domaines near and around Aniane, an area of stunning natural beauty that happens to be home to Mas de Daumas Gassac and Grange de Peres – and the place where Robert Mondavi gambled on a Languedoc domain, and lost. (His plans to purchase land near Aniane were scuttled politically by the area’s farmers.) You can see why he tried, though. Situated near the L’Herault River and a gorge traversed in Roman times by a bridge known as the Pont du Diable, it is a spectacular place to make wine.
Mas de Daumas Gassac, which I visited, offers ample proof of that potential in its graceful white wine and sternly powerful Bordeaux-inspired red. Aime Guibert also makes wines from old vine Mourvedre, Syrah, Carignan and Alicante, which prove he can work similar magic with the native material — these, however, are not imported.
I will continue to pick through the wines from this region with interest and skepticism.The great promise of Languedoc seems to be there still, but in a forest of cheap wine, the tall trees are still hard to discern.