Wines of the Languedoc-Roussillon
Quality and Value: Artisanal Wines from France’s Southern Vineyard
Small family-owned vineyards in the Languedoc-Roussillon region are producing some of France's finest hand made wines at very modest prices.
There’s a lot going on in France’s largest vineyard. The Languedoc-Roussillon has emerged as an important producer of quality wines over the past two decades. This was perfectly illustrated by a clever publicity stunt arranged by prominent London wine dealers Liz and Mike Berry. They organized a blind tasting for wine professionals with eight top midi wines competing in four separate flights against four appropriately chosen sacred cows from prestigious French appellations in Bordeaux and the Rhone.
Midi Wines Score Highly in Blind Tasting
No points for guessing the outcome. After all, a good publicity stunt has to yield a result more newsworthy than a dog-bites-man story. So yes, the southern team carried the day, and this will hardly shock aficionados who have been enjoying these wines over the past decade or so.
Although the contenders were hand picked and the organizers made a shrewd guess as to the likely outcome before footing the bill, their point was well made since the southern competitors sell for around £20 in London, a fraction of the price tags on the old worthies they competed against, including two highly regarded Bordeaux reds, Chateau Petrus and Leoville-Barton. Stunt or no stunt, who could escape noting that there’s great value in the south?
Drinkers already familiar with the wines of the Languedoc-Roussillon don’t need a crystal ball to discern which wines are likely to be the future “Grand Crus”, comparable in some respects to wines that enjoy a special distinction in already consecrated French regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhone and the Alsace. Although new stars are being born and there will be more to come, in general the emerging stars of today—such those from Domaine Alain Chabanon that won two flights in the Berrys’ competition—are tomorrow’s grand crus, with or without a special distinction on their label to spell it out. At present the prices of these wines seem modest in comparison to the cost of distinguished wines from France’s top regions.
Good news for consumers of French wines
Further good news for consumers in countries with high excise barriers like the US, UK or Ireland is that, unlike cheaper French wines selling abroad for double or triple their original price, many of the more costly low-production wines from the best small producers, typically selling for 12 to 30 Euro, are already priced for export, so drinkers abroad in some cases pay just a bit more than in France.
Public awareness is lagging behind the results in the vineyards, partly due to lack of information. Consider that encyclopedic wine books published only 10 or 15 years ago included just a few paragraphs covering this enormous vineyard that accounts for over a third of total French wine production. Many place names are still unfamiliar to wine drinkers. The name Languedoc-Roussillon is a hybrid term for an administrative region that encompasses two smaller regions—the Languedoc and Roussillon—with a good deal in common and quite a few differences. The Languedoc is far larger, comprising three French departements and quite a few independent wine regions with their own apellation controllée, such as the Minervois and the Corbiers. The latter is just next door to the Roussillon and by itself larger in area. Readers curious to discover the wines most often considered the stars of France’s southern vineyard can find out by reading the linked articles in Suite 101 covering these regions in greater detail.
