Learning the Languedoc by Tom Doorley
This time last week, I was in the south of France, largely to attend a tasting of the wines that Dunnes Stores will be featuring in their French wine sale in September (now that Superquinn is no more it looks like Dunnes are keen to take up the French baton). It was, as always for me, lovely to be amongst the vines and amongst people who regard good food as nothing out of the ordinary and decent wine as important as water.
Oh yes, the French have a certain savoir vivre alright.
Anyway, perhaps I’m a divil for punishment but I quite enjoy plodding through the vines in temperatures of about 30ºC and picking handfuls of wild herbs from the surrounding garrigue: low-growing thyme, spindly thickets of rosemary and very conventional looking fennel setting bright yellow seed heads in the sun. These are the elements that make up the scent of the garrigue, but you need a whiff of lavender too just to get the correct southern French balance.
I ate supper in the shade of trees at the Les Auzines estate with Neasa Miquel who is originally from Deansgrange in south County Dublin and her husband Laurent and watched the sun sink over the rough hillsides of Corbières with a glimpse of the snow-flecked Pyrenees in the distance.
Corbières covers a vast chunk of the Languedoc near Carcassone and it’s an appellation worth knowing about, in that I find it a strangely dependable source of big-boned, dark, intense (sometimes brooding) red wines – which is interesting, given that it covers some 25,000 hectares of hilly land that looks vaguely like Tuscany but with more heat and many, many fewer tourists.
The key grapes here are Grenache, that great old workhorse of Languedoc-Rousillon, Syrah (the classic red grape of the Northern Rhone), Mourvedre (known as Monastrell in Spain) and Carignan (which Jancis Robinson has described as having a lot of everything except charm; it’s a grape that performs best in blends).
I find the best Corbières are from single domaines and they all strike me as having two features in common: a generous dollop of ripe, supple but not blowsy fruit and what I think of as a strong Syrah influence in the form of a whiff of burnt rubber. (Try Les Auzines Les Hautes Terres Corbieres 2009 from O’Brien’s).
Now, neighbouring Minervois is much smaller (“only” 5,000 hectares) and is generally regarded as producing, or at least being capable of producing, wines with a bit more finesse from the same grapes and a landscape that doesn’t look radically different. Certainly the Minervois-la-Livinière appellation has some quite elegant wines.
I was staying not far away in the appellation of Cabardès, not a wine you see much of in Ireland – or anywhere else for that matter – as it covers only 500 hectares. It produces red and rosé wines from a curious recipe that demands the inclusion of at least one of the Atlantique grape varieties as they call them down here (the ones we think of as Bordeaux’s Cabernet, Merlot and Malbec or Cot) and at least one of the more usual local suspects like Grenache, Syrah and so forth.
The wines are pretty robust, a little like common or garden Bordeaux’s but with a bit more attitude and stuffing. Indeed the red from Chateau de Pennautier, where I was staying, is a delightfully chunky wine that tackles a rare, peppery steak with the greatest of ease. At the time of writing, the 2011 vintage costs a modest €12 in Dunnes Stores. The rosé, at the same price, is unusual in that it has oodles of fruit and while it’s quite dry it’s not austerely so. In fact, it’s a bit like a very ripe but light red wine if you can imagine such a contradictory thing.
Laurent and Neasa Miquel make a vast range of wines but they are somewhat notorious in Languedoc for the Albarino vines over beside where we tucked into local tomato salad and a glorious seafood stew. This is because Albarino is a Spanish grape (which may or may not be a clone of Riesling or even Petit Manseng) best known in Rias-Baixas in Galicia where it makes peachy, quite perfumed white wines.
In other words, it’s very much an immigrant in these parts. The Miquels’ Albarino vines are young and the wine (which is in Dunnes Stores, currently reduced from €17 to €11) is very crisp, fresh and tart, especially when you consider the scope for ripeness on these parched but drip-irrigated hillsides. It’s also delicious and a pioneering wine that qualifies, due to legal restrictions, only for the lowliest of categories: Vin de France.
Dunnes Stores is where you will find many of the Miquels’ wines (Neasa used to work in Dunnes), including the innovative Nord Sud ones where grapes from cooler and warmer climates come together in beautifully crafted balance.
Just at present, consider also two special offers from Tesco. Cazal-Viel Saint-Chinian Cuvée Les Fees 2010 is from another Miquel operation and is wonderfully ripe and rich, with a touch of damson and pepper, for a very keen €12.99. There is also Laurent Miquel L’Artisan Faugeres 2011, a snip when reduced to €9 as it is right now. Both Saint-Chinian and Faugeres are also Languedoc appellations and we’re talking the same grapes as in Corbières.
Read Tom Doorley every weekend in the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Mail on Sunday.
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