The Rebirth of France’s Vinous Underbelly

Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, local farmers go to the market square of Carcassonne to sell their produce: slightly battered apricots, earthily delicious lettuces, honey, goat cheese, a few bunches of flowers straight from the garden--and wine. Last summer, as I wandered around the market of this ancient city in the south of France, I noticed that almost everyone selling wine had a Chardonnay. It brought home to me just how much the Languedoc, the world’s biggest wine region, has changed since we started spending our summers there in 1989.

Back then, it was a sleepy, uninterrupted swath of vineyard tended, in a distinctly desultory fashion, by thousands of co-op growers, remarkably few of whom had any concept of real wine quality. We bought decent but unexciting wine from a grand total of about six reliable producers, all of whom were thrilled to find anyone from outside the region with any interest in their products.

In the late 1980s, the local restaurants could offer precisely one Chardonnay, Gibalaux, from a particularly enterprising grower in the Minervois zone. And while I would be the last to suggest that Chardonnay acreage is a direct measure of a wine region’s achievements, it has surely become some sort of index of sophistication.

Nowadays, when buying wine to drink during our holidays in the Languedoc, I find myself competing with buyers from all over the world for wines that even the French--perhaps the last to realize that a miracle was taking place on their southern doorstep--now acknowledge as some of the world’s best values.

Every half-awake northern French wine firm, it seems, is developing its own “second label” wines from the south of France, typically labeled by grape variety. But the French firms are engaged in hand-to-hand combat over supplies with American wine buyers eager to make up their own shortfall in California and Washington. And the Languedoc is making just the sort of wine for which non-French northern Europeans have developed a taste.

Wine brokers in the Languedoc must now be making money nearly as easily as barrel makers in Burgundy and builders in the Medoc have been.

It has been well publicized that the Australians have been influencing Languedoc winemaking, thanks partly to Hardy’s investment in La Baume winery, but it has been just one of many parallel forces for change.

Technology has certainly helped southern French wine producers make fresh, fruity wines in their relatively hot climate, but now that young French wine producers are encouraged to travel, they would have found their way without Australians and other flying winemakers.

And in any case, California-influenced Robert Skalli, whose family wine company has been based in the region since 1961, was already heading in that direction for his Fortant de France range of varietals.

These semi-industrial efforts have been of enormous economic significance, particularly in establishing for the world’s most voracious bottlers a deep reservoir of technically sound Vin de Pays d’Oc, the standard-bearer of the region (it is remarkable to realize that this category is only 10 years old).

But for me, the real excitement of the region has been taking place in much smaller cellars and, more particularly, in vineyards generally at rather higher altitudes with rather lower yields.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of truly ambitious vignerons who have tasted seriously good wine made elsewhere and realize that it can also be made, often quite inexpensively, in the Languedoc. The wines they make may be labeled Vins de Pays, but often they’re called Co^teaux du Languedoc, St. Chinian, Faugeres, Minervois, Corbieres, Fitou or, on the eastern frontier with the southern Rho^ne, Costieres de Ni^mes.

A few of these individualists are native to the region; most of them are newcomers. Where we summer, we now have neighbors who include a Belgian insurance salesman, who was seduced by the potential of his Corbieres vineyards, and the ex-publisher of France’s leading wine magazine, who now leads the much more rustic life of a vigneronne in the hills above Beziers.

Irritatingly close to home, there’s the English accountant and his wife who have dropped out to realize their dream of making wine. We are now--irony of ironies--kept awake at night by the hum of the motor needed to cool the barrels they’ve installed in the old wine cellar next door.

These people have not been drawn by technical innovation and only partly by the relatively low price of land, increasingly invaded by other crops as the older generation takes government subsidies to pull out unfashionable vine varieties from unsuitable plots. They are drawn by passion and the inherent possibilities of a region that was producing wine long before Bordeaux and Burgundy.

If even the smallholders of Carcassonne are selling Chardonnay, along with the giant sunflowers that gradually change the summer landscape from green to yellow, the Languedoc has truly become part of the greater world of wine.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sources

Though certainly not in the numbers of Bordeaux and Cabernet Sauvignon, wines from the Languedoc are plentiful in Los Angeles’ fine wine stores. Here are the current favorites of a few retailers.

Hi-Time Wine Cellars, 250 Ogle St., Costa Mesa. (714) 650-8463. 1995 Prieure St.-Jean de Bebian ($16.95).

Northridge Hills Wines and Spirits, 11249 Tampa Ave., Northridge. (818) 368-7330. 1995 Domaine de l’Hortus “Classique” ($9.99); 1994 Mas des Chimeres ($9.99).

Wally’s, 2107 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 475-0606. Any of the wines from Baron Phillipe de Rothschild ($9.99), 1995 Les Platanes de la Marquise Chardonnay ($10.99), 1995 Guy Chevalier “Les Bertrals” ($8.99; 1996 Domaine de l’Hortus “Rose de Saignee” ($9.99).

The Wine House, 2311 Cotner Ave., Los Angeles. (310) 479-3731. 1995 Domaine de l’Hortus “Pic Saint Loup” $13.89; 1994 Catherine de Saint Juery Syrah ($6.49); 1995 Cha^teau Rouquette sur Mer “La Clape” ($8.99).