This is the second book that came to me on a roundabout. The first one is another story, for another time.
This particular roundabout is the one that sits just off the first exit for Argelès and Le Racou after you leave Collioure on the autoroute headed towards Perpignan. It’s still in the hilly bit, before the flat bit. We were going the other way; towards Collioure, from Argelès. Andy was driving. He features quite heavily in this book, as it’s him that I make wine with. We were heading back towards Collioure from the winery and as we were crossing the roundabout and curling off on the exit towards town, I mentioned that ‘some day’ I wanted to write a book about wine and this place, that I wanted to call it Where the Mountains Meet the Sea. I was telling Andy because he’d mentioned the phrase that I wanted to be the title a few vintages before and I felt that quietly mentioning it without him saying, ‘Hey, that’s my fucking line’ would be his tacit approval of the title. As we took the coast road into Collioure, up and down the hills covered in terraced vines, the sea on our left, and the taller foothills of the Pyrenees rising in front of us to the right, it seemed a good title. At that point that’s all it was, just a title and a mention of intent.
It’s not even that title anymore.
And ‘some day’ turned out to be somewhat sooner than I expected.
This isn’t a wine book, not really. It has quite a lot of wine in it, both made and drunk. It has some vinous vocabulary, and even a glossary to provide some manner of guide to words like ‘remontage’ and ‘residual sugar’. But the intent is not to teach you everything about wine in the Roussillon, Collioure and Banyuls. It’s not a reference guide; I don’t even give the addresses of the wineries that I work at (you can probably find them online). Nor is it a collection of tasting notes or maps or diagrams. There are no photos of pristine grapes bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Instead there are stories; the stories about the place and the people that take wine from grape to bottle.
I should also point out that the experiences written here are mine. I don’t know of any winery that does things exactly the same as any other winery. The comportes we use hold 50 kilos worth of grapes, the comportes they use in Chablis hold 13 kilos worth. Many wineries don’t use comportes; everything just gets bunged into the back of a tractor. Nothing contained in these pages should be considered ubiquitous in the wine world, save perhaps the difficulty of the work and the devotion of those that do it.
While it is a book of stories, it is not without points of reference. Some are scientific, some are historical and some are geographical. I have asked for advice and clarification from several people, though all of the research I’ve done is my own work. Andy Cook provided the vast bulk of technical knowledge and advice regarding winemaking, but any errors are mine, not his.
– RWHB
June, 2013