Wine notes
Sweet wines Aniane & Mondavi Languedoc matters
We are very fond of sweet wines. Often the word 'sweet' tells only part of the story - the best have aroma and freshness as well as more than usual sugar.
Mostly the sugar is the natural content of the grape juice*. In most wine, all of it is turned into alcohol during fermentation. Either fermentation is slowed down and stopped by cooling leaving some sugar, or alcohol is added to kill the yeast before all the sugar is used up.
In many cases, sweet wines are made by using riper than usual grapes - if they are late-picked they develop more sugar on the vine, and sometimes a special fungus - 'noble rot' - intensifies the sugar content still further.
There are costs and risks in using late-picked grapes - the weather has more chance to wreck a crop; riper grapes shrivel so you need more to get a given volume of juice; not all grapes on a bunch ripen at the same rate so you may need to hand-pick individual grapes (in French, vendanges passerillés); and if you wait for noble rot you sometimes get the wrong sort of fungus and the whole crop is ruined. So many sweet wines are relatively expensive.
Great sweet wines made from late-picked grapes include Sauternes and Barsac from Bordeaux, and many German wines from Riesling and other grape varieties. Some of our favourites from other parts of France are Coteaux du Layon and Bonnezeaux made of chenin blanc grapes, from the area south of Anjou in the lower Loire (these have astonishing keeping qualities for white wines and we have drunk 20- and 25-year-old examples which were delicious.
Closer to our new home and in the Rhône valley there are a number of well-known muscat vins doux naturels - the term is misleading since they are all made by stopping fermentation with alcohol, so are fortified like sherry or port. The best known of these is from Beaumes de Venise in the southern Rhône but Languedoc-Roussillon examples include Rivesaltes, St Jean de Minervois, Frontignan and our own local appellation, Muscat de Lunel.
Recently (July 2007) we have found wonderful sweet wines in Friuli in north-east Italy - Piccolit and Ramondolo are examples - and have realised that there are many wines in Italy like these which use late-picked grapes for sweetness but also enhance and concentrate them by partly drying the grapes before fermenting them. Obviously this produces still less wine from a given quantity of grapes!
Aniane and the nearby village of Montpeyroux (near St Guilhem le Desert west of Montpellier - see map) are home to some of the great wines of the Languedoc. We have not yet visited the area for wine although we did enjoy a visit to the picturesque St G in November 06. But now that we know our neighbour Michel's brother in law works in the Cave Co-operative in Aniane we are very likely to go - more anon when we do.
However, Aniane is also famous as a focus for the battle between old wine traditions and the new world of big business, explored in the recent film Mondovino, known here as l'affaire Mondavi. A local vineyard, Mas de Daumas Gassac, had become more than usually famous for its outstanding (and expensive!) wines, and this attracted the attention of the Californian wine magnate Robert Mondavi (who also makes stellar wines at stellar cost). His business had begun to develop in the Languedoc playing on a strong American market for French wines, and linked to the sense that the mystique of terroir (the peculiarly French insistence on the importance of where grapes grow as the origin of a wine's unique flavour and character) was worth buying into.
Mondavi started to buy scrubland or garrigue near Daumas Gassac, with the intention of planting vines and setting up a rival business. The village was split and elections put in place a mayor who blocked the creation of the new vineyard - a victory it was claimed for the traditional values. In fact, Aniane and Montpeyroux have a whole clutch of cult wine-makers already, and - we may find - others who are less well-known but probably as good. And it could be argued that by entering the southern French market Mondavi was acknowledging the importance of some of the traditional ideas and methods. Big business is certainly all around in the wine world, but it does not stop smaller producers continuing to succeed in their own more limited markets and ambitions. While smaller and less-well-known are our particular favourites and discoveries, occasional tastings remind us that the stellar names and high prices often go with rather remarkable wine like that from Daumas Gassac. I will add something on some cult wines (from Mondovino and elsewhere) when I have time!
Languedoc past present and future
Someone who knows us well recently said "I'm not really sure where the Languedoc is". Well, Languedoc-Roussillon is a huge region that stretches along the Mediterranean coast from the Spanish border to the Rhône delta, and inland from the marshes and lakes of the coast to the mountainous hills of the Cevennes. But this is not the place for geography lessons nor am I the one to give them - the point here is that it is one of the biggest wine producing regions in the world, and that our friend isn't the only one in GB or elsewhere who is not really sure where the wines come from. Jacques Gravegeal, president of one of the biggest wine brands in the Languedoc and part of a family of generations of wine-growers north of Montpellier, is trying to change this by creating the brand Sud de France (or South of France) for all the wines of the region.
Of course, this latest of many attempts to market Languedoc wines more effectively is partly a response to the Europe-wide crisis of over-production in the wine industry - sell more, and fewer vines will be destroyed, fewer wine-makers will lose their livelihood. Another important and longstanding concern is quality vs quantity - often the wine makers we meet have halved the output from their vineyards and increased quality proportionately, in several ways - they select grapes during picking rather than taking whole bunches, rduce the number of ripe grapes by picking and discarding some bunches early, allow weeds or grass to grow between rows of vines on purpose to restrict growth, and often encourage older vines which have lower but more flavourful yields. Against this is the constant demand for lower prices - although a lot of the wines we buy are 6-12 € a bottle, you can still get good everyday red from the local co-op for 2.60€ a litre and there is little room there for restricting yields to increase quality.
2007 is the centenary of protests in the Languedoc against unfair overproduction of wine from elsewhere - this problem is not new in the south of France. Hundreds of thousands of winemakers then took to the streets in Montpellier, Béziers and surrounding areas in demonstrations that provoked harsh responses from government - when local army units proved sympathetic troops from the north were sent to quell the protests. Now, protests are still frequent - supermarkets and depots have been attacked by arsonists this year, and over the past few years imported Chilean wine containers have been smashed. But the serious effort continues to focus on improving quality to win back consumers abroad and also here in France. Some of the debate at Saint Christol last week (see wine diary) was about winning back French consumers of wines as apéritifs as well as with meals - here in this house we are firm converts despite the occasional lapse into pastis and sherry!!
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