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Languedoc wine region, France

Languedoc – France’s largest wine-producing area – is a land twice blessed and once cursed. Stretching from the mouth of the Rhône in the east to Spanish-accented Narbonne in the west, it has the sun and soils to make it the envy of less-blessed regions.

However, for too much of its history, it has been a case of All This Useless Beauty – its buckets of sun producing high volumes of diluted wines, a moribund cooperative system rewarding quantity over quality, and an unquestioning belief in tradition; in many cases, this means dirty cellars and soils exhausted by chemicals and over-cropping.

It is little wonder that Languedoc, for much of its recent history, was viewed as the symbolic centre of Europe’s wine lake. And it’s a region where symbolism can turn nasty: imported wine emptied into the lagoon at Sète; tax offices and banks attacked for their perceived role in wine profiteering; “blood will flow” videos sent by hooded men to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Their demands: protection for Languedoc grape growers from the raft of cheap, higher-quality New World wines landing on France’s supermarket shelves.

And while no one is tarring the industry at-large with such acts of extremism, these incidents confirm the worst suspicions of France’s northern wine bourgeoisie – beautifully embodied in the film Mondovino by the cigar-puffing, Bordelaise uber-consultant Michel Rolland – that Languedoc is populated entirely by simple peasants.

If Olivier Jullien’s Mas Jullien wines are the work of a simple peasant, then I suspect he is happy to live with the tag. Talking and tasting with him shows just how far Languedoc has come and its potential to produce wines that are as expressive and accented as any in the world.

Jullien grew up on the family estate in Jonquières, 40 kilometres inland from Montpellier. As a youngster, he lived through the grape growers’ uprisings of the late 70s and the exodus from the vineyards of a young generation who saw wine as a dead end. Jullien, however, stayed and by the age of 20 had made his first wines. He gradually purchased land beyond the family domaine, planted vines and made wine under the Mas Jullien label. Suitably inspired, his father left the local cooperative in 1993 – and with it a lifetime of financial security – to create his own label, Mas Cal Demoura. As the younger Jullien puts it, “with this courageous and highly symbolic action, he quite simply became himself”.

Jullien’s story resounds across Languedoc today. From the Montagne Noire of Minervois in sight of the Pyrenees to the Rhône in its final fling at Nîmes, a new generation of winemakers – measured by attitude, not age – is breathing life back into Languedoc: Mas Jullien, Mas de Daumas Gassac, Domaine de la Grange des Pères in Terrasses du Larzac; Domaine Borie de Maurel and Château Coupe Roses in Minervois; and Mas des Bressades in Costières de Nîmes, to name a few.

If there is a common link here, it is their determination to recast tradition and create a new story for Languedoc. In many cases, this has meant working outside France’s appellation system and producing vin de pays – albeit of higher quality and at higher prices than an AOC wine from their neighbour’s plot. Call it the price of freedom.

Leaving behind these standout producers, Languedoc’s wines can be a lucky, and sometimes disappointing, dip for Australian and New Zealand consumers. Where other regions of France provide comfort (but no guarantees) with their recognizable AOC badges – Bordeaux, Chablis, Côtes du Rhône – Languedoc remains a wine minefield.

The region’s better producers are only too aware of this and have responded in a most un-French way: by turning to the New World. Out goes place of origin, in comes wine by variety – merlot, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc stamped on the label as boldly as any Australian shiraz or Argentinian malbec.

Today, merlot is the most planted grape variety in Languedoc. The most common designation for Languedoc’s varietally badged wines is Vin de Pays d’Oc. The reasoning is straightforward: producers want to make their traditional wines – the grenache, carignan, syrah and mourvèdre blends that, in the new Languedoc, are referred to as terroir wines. However, merlot and cabernet are cash cows – cheaper to produce, easier to market and with better profit margins. The profits from these varietal wines, the reasoning goes, support the production of the classic terroir wines.

In many quarters the strategy is working, sometimes spectacularly well. In a case of selling coal to Newcastle, Jean-Claude Mas, the brains behind the Arrogant Frog brand, has attacked the Australian sub-$15 market with eye-catching, cheeky varietal wines from Pézenas, near Montpellier. Sales of Mas’ wines through Woolworths Liquor and Dan Murphy’s – including the Arrogant Frog range – grew by 50 per cent in 2008 to approximately 600,000 bottles, according to Woolworths Liquor’s Michael Bynon.

Mas is in no doubt where these wines fit into his aggressive export scheme. “Fruit, fruit and fruit. They are a French response to the challenge of the New World, proof that the French can make wines to match and even better those produced in other countries.” From a French perspective, it would be easy to dismiss Mas as a flash marketer reliant on industrial-style wine production – the very sins that the French visit upon their Australian peers.

This ignores the fact that Mas is a very talented winemaker and viticultural perfectionist. A drive through the vineyards that surround the Mas family home near Pézenas – Jean-Claude is the fourth generation of his family to grow or make wine here – is a lesson in the bounty and ruin of Languedoc. “There is not one Languedoc. There are 20,” he remarks. To drive home his point, Mas points to a plot that he calls “the old Languedoc” – ill-kept rows of high-yielding carignan and cinsault infested by mildew, weeds and bamboo. “Here,” Mas says, pointing to the detritus, “you have a region that was built on a philosophy that has nothing to do with anything you would understand in Australia. Here, vines should give grapes – no matter what type of grapes – and you should get them to the cellar and press them. Then they give wine.

“But 25 years ago things started to change. We began to experiment, to find the right soil for the right grapes.” We walk through the weeds to Mas’ own neatly spaced rows of cabernet. Despite the comparative health of the vines, Mas is still not happy. “The cabernet here is a mistake. It needs a smaller plot and more water.”

The mention of the right soil for the right grapes raises the notion of terroir. Chardonnay in France’s hot south? Mas says, “The notion of terroir has been completely bastardized. Terroir today is really the man. Yes, we have beautiful terroir, but it is the man who looks after the land that makes the difference. People here have always talked of terroir and all they were doing was making a lot of juice.”

Leaving Mas and the plains country of central Languedoc, a two-hour, winding drive north-west and inland takes you to the foot of the Montagne Noire and the appellations of Minervois and Minervois la Livinière. Here the winds and weather intersect to help shape the region’s wines. Stopping on a November day on the road to Minerve, the Pyrenees are hazy in the distance with a cold, drying wind blowing off the Montagne Noire and the Massif Central to the north. Like the Rhône Valley’s mistral, the chilly air is a winemaker’s friend, keeping mildew at bay when the wet fronts from the Atlantic arrive. Close to 2600 hours per year of Mediterranean sun and breezes ensure that almost any variety you choose to plant will ripen.

Michel Escande’s Domaine Borie de Maurel in Minervois la Livinière is set deep inside Languedoc’s dark hill country. His initial career was in the navy, and his return to the land was done with “the tenacity of a sailor and the faith of a peasant farmer”. Within a few years of releasing his first wines, he had landed the moniker The Wizard of Félines, largely on the reputation of his all-syrah Cuvée Sylla Minervois. Photos of him invariably portray the Wizard as an alchemist-cum-poet – an apt depiction of the man and his wines.

Escande is a confirmed terroir-iste who has nursed his 28 hectares of soil back to health, using just horse and plough wherever possible. The wines themselves seem chiseled straight out of the Montage Noire, such is the flavour of black fruits and brooding minerality.

 He is a gentle man of forthright views. He has no time for those in Languedoc who have slavishly followed global wine fashion and done so with little regard for, or understanding of, their own terroir. “They lost their souls,” is his simple riposte. Like other winemakers of his ilk, he has a cogent and often poetic view of his craft that, in this case, translates into wines of singular brilliance – none more so than the Cuvée Sylla Minervois, which arguably belongs at the same table as the great shirazes from Hermitage, Côte Rôtie, the Barossa or Eden Valley.

“What is good wine? It is wine that has balance when you taste it. What is great wine? You have balance, but then you also have typicity. The mountain behind us is the terroir. But the more you do, the more you water, the less you can smell the mountain. When a man intervenes, there is no balance in the wine. A man is not a god.”

Bruno Raymond, the technical director and winemaker at Les Vins de Saint-Saturnin cooperative in Terrasses du Larzac, makes no claims to godliness but clearly has the patience of Job. He leads a collective of 100 local growers, and since starting in 1980, he has performed a high-wire act to turn the cooperative model on its head. That has meant convincing the growers to act in the opposite fashion to their fathers and grandfathers. Whereas once the grapes came in willy nilly, were weighed, crushed and sent to dubious destinations by the tanker-load, you now have green harvesting to reduce yields, careful picking windows to ensure physiological and phenolic maturity, and wine sold only in bottle – nary a tanker in sight. 60 per cent of Saint-Saturnin’s wine is exported, with the Pierre de Prunet Vins de Pays range performing particularly strongly, even in wine bars and retailers across Australia.

In many ways, Saint-Saturnin and its success is Languedoc come full circle. The cooperative’s holdings adjoin Mas Jullien, and Raymond and Jullien are good friends. If Jullien’s drive is to “know what is under every stone”, Raymond’s motivations are more prosaic. “The globalisation of wine is good. But you still need roots. You need to remember where you come from.”

Clearly, there is no single path forward for Languedoc and its wines – as Jean-Claude Mas suggested. Olivier Jullien, who was born and bred on the Terrasses du Larzac and chose to stay, sees life here in its broadest terms. “My generation must make good quality wine otherwise we can’t live on these lands. We are small and the rest of the world will forget us unless we make these wines.

“Now is the beginning of the story of wine in Languedoc. We still don’t know where the best terroir is; where the premier crus are. For me, this land has the potential to make the best wine in the world. But of course I am not objective. I was born here.”

TEXT PAUL HUGGETT PHOTOGRAPHY MAS DE DAUMAS-GASSAC

This article was published in the February/March 2010 issue of Gourmet Traveller WINE.