Adventures on the Wine Route

FROM BORDEAUX, with its celebrated châteaux and stock-exchange mentality, I head southeast through Toulouse to the Languedoc.

Research in vain through the wine books for information about the Languedoc, that broad curved swatch of southern France west of the Rhône which stretches almost to the Spanish border and includes Carcassonne, Narbonne, Nîmes, and Montpellier—in terms of liquid volume, the largest wine-producing province of France. Under Languedoc, in the 1970 edition of Alexis Lichine’s Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits, there is the following entry: “A vast plain in southern France embracing the department of the Hérault where quantities of wine are made, mostly mediocre. One of the better ones is Clairette du Languedoc.” Hardly a thirst-inspiring expenditure of verbiage for a province which in an average year produces 660 million gallons of wine—over 3 billion bottles! Thankfully, recent editions of Lichine’s Encyclopedia have been more generous.

The Languedoc is a rewarding place to tour, unless it is August, when Europeans who cannot afford the Riviera crowd to ravage its beaches. There is a wild, savage beauty to the landscape, stark and colorful at once, and the province abounds in medieval fortresses and cathedrals, impossible geological formations, sandy Mediterranean beaches, and unpretentious cuisine.

It is almost, but not quite, Provence. No, it is more austere, more Protestant, less passionate, less gay than Provence.

Let us begin at Carcassonne, not for its wine but for its splendid (when seen from afar) medieval city, where you cannot find a decent morsel to eat, much less a respectable cassoulet or a glass of drinkable local wine. Corpulent air-conditioned buses evacuate streams of camera-laden tourists, who shove through the massive fortress walls into the city. It is a grand, depressing place that shouldn’t be missed. Just don’t eat there. Wander the ramparts, the windy streets, and imagine what once was.

Driving east toward Narbonne and the Mediterranean, you enter the Corbières, one of France’s most handsome wine regions. Particularly in the fall, after the grape harvest, you gaze upon it and say to yourself, “Someone should paint this,” but it would require a colorist like van Gogh or Vlaminck to do it justice. The severe landscape (the impression is not altogether unlike one’s impression of America’s own Southwest) is transfigured by the change of season. Everywhere you look, there are vines. These are not neat little slopes as in Burgundy; here, as far as you can see, there is a rugged patchwork of vines, and as they give their last gasp in November, a rush of jubilant color bursts into the dying leaves. Whereas in Burgundy the plants are Pinot, here there are countless different grape varieties and each patch glows its own brilliant hue. The Alicante, I discovered, is responsible for those blasts of vivid purple, and there are orange, yellow, gold, red-red, even leaves of a luminous milky white, and so on. What a spell is cast by this radiant display even as the dead of winter approaches.

There you have the only reason I can think of for visiting the Languedoc in November.

As for hotels, I’ve not been the victim of all that much experimentation. I continue to return to the Relais du Val d’Orbieu outside Ornaisons, fifteen kilometers west of Narbonne and well-situated for all sorts of day trips. I return to the Relais even though the guidebooks keep adding stars, toques, and birdies to it, which has had an inflationary effect on the price of a decent night’s lodging. But there is a swimming pool, which is useful in the Languedoc. And there is rosemary, thyme, and lavender everywhere you look, and comfortable rooms, and a welcome silence, except when the wind howls. The Relais sits by itself out on a deserted highway, battened down so you won’t be blown away by that terrible and faithless wind, the tramontane, the Languedoc’s version of Provence’s mistral.

The restaurant receives kudos, but I am tempted to say that the best southern French restaurant is in Berkeley at Chez Panisse, where the menu changes nightly. At the Relais the limited menu varies not at all from night to night. What a bore. A bore not for me; I can move on, but what about the poor chef? How does he guard his sanity, stuck out there cooking the same thing night after night?

One evening I had the loup, a favorite Mediterranean fish grilled in the typical fashion, with a stalk of fennel shoved down its gullet. It was overcooked, so I asked for some olive oil with which to moisten its flesh. The waiter returned. “I’m sorry, sir, there is no olive oil,” he whispered.

I told him I didn’t need a special presentation, just go into the kitchen and borrow a bottle of olive oil from the chef.

He returned once more, shaking his head. “There is no olive oil in the kitchen.”

Another night I cleaned my plate of one of their specialties, a thing I would entitle Thyme and Catsup Chicken. I cannot really recommend it, but I sat there licking my fingers, slightly ashamed, which shows how difficult it is to ruin thyme and tomato.

Their local wines are intelligently selected, but the Languedoc has few proper cellars, so beware of the condition of older vintages. I learned my lesson when I had to send back a dead bottle of 1955 Yquem.

From their list I did discover one rare treat, a delicious white Corbières produced by Jean Berail almost next door, in Ornaisons. Because I argue so often against wines that have been too processed, people think that I am against technology, which is not the case. I pay for the equipment to ship my wines in refrigerated containers in order to assure these living creatures a safe voyage. That is utilizing a technology that was not previously available to importers. Jean Berail was first in the Corbières to employ cold fermentation and succeed in making a dry white there that was fresh and lively, instead of cooked and flat.

Side trips: Enjoy a pastis outdoors in centre ville Narbonne while you people-watch or devour an English-language newspaper found up the street. Avoid Narbonne’s flat, windy beaches, which are overrun with tourists in campers and trailers.

Go south along the coast, almost to Spain, to Collioure and Banyuls-sur-Mer, two of the prettiest harbors on the French Mediterranean. If it is summer, jump in the ocean.

You can go ten kilometers south of Lézignan to Boutenac and buy a few bottles of Corbières rouge and gris de gris from Yves Laboucarie. This fellow is likable, dedicated, and has a heart so big … He may also be a bit bored there in podunk Boutenac, so don’t be shy about stopping.

Taking his wines in proper order of service, his gris de gris is a crisp, dry beauty that leaves you smacking your lips—the wine drinker’s applause. You hear a lot about the Rosé de Provence, but except for Domaine Tempier’s Bandol rosé, I’ve yet to encounter a better rosé than Yves’s in the south of France.

According to locals, Laboucarie’s Domaine de Fontsainte Cuvée des Demoiselles is the finest red Corbières being produced in the 1980s. The twelve-acre Demoiselles vineyard rolls down like a carpet from a hilltop crowned with forest much like Le Corton. It is 80 percent Carignan, 10 percent Grenache noir, 10 percent a mélange of ancient varieties, including Mourvèdre. The entire vineyard consists of seventy- to eighty-year-old vines! The Cuvée des Demoiselles is vinified in oak, fined with egg whites, and bottled unfiltered. It has rich, racy, mellow flavors marked by a spicy cinnamon aspect.

One can continue south from Boutenac on the little roads toward the Pyrénées. The land is burnt sienna and vast, but by no means barren; if you photograph, you’ll find a lot to click about.

And there are vines everywhere. Brillat-Savarin noted two features that distinguish man from beast:

In this landscape you will delight in the revelation of mankind’s tenacious pursuit of number 2, because you will see vines planted upon the most impossible-looking terrains. The trouble is, almost all of it is swill. Most of it looks, smells, and tastes bad.

Justifiably infamous for the volume of plonk it produces, the Languedoc is planted in grape varieties selected for the quantity they can produce. To almost all the winegrowers of the Languedoc, wine is a crop. They might as well be growing beans or potatoes. Yield is everything, and the price of their crop is normally based not upon its quality but upon its alcohol content. Consequently, one calculates the value of a plot of land by the volume of grape juice that can be tapped from it. Were one to use such standards to gauge value in California, acreage in the San Joaquin Valley would be more valuable than Napa’s Martha’s Vineyard or Stony Hill’s priceless little plot of Chardonnay!

VINEYARD IN THE LANGUEDOC

Of course, the liquid volume produced by fertile flatland soil is greater than that produced by stony hillside sites, but if you are searching for wines with character and flavor interest, you must head for the hills. Fortunately, the Creator littered the rugged terrain of the Languedoc with stony hillsides.

Alain Roux of the Domaine de Saint-Jean de Bebian says, “Often the best vineyards are the cheapest because no one else wants them. I buy them and my neighbors think I’m crazy.”

Alain is a passionate young wine fanatic, an important pioneer in the development of fine wine in the Languedoc. One sees in Alain’s 1980 and 1981—the first vintages he sold in bottle—that the Languedoc is a land of enormous possibility. These are wines that grab you by the nose and force you to pay attention.

Saint-Jean de Bebian’s wine has changed since Alain took over. His grandfather made wine, but sold it off in bulk like almost everyone else. After his grandfather’s death in 1954, Alain’s parents did nothing to improve the domaine. Alain himself was uninterested until he went away to the university and developed a friendship with a young winemaker from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, who accompanied him home to Saint-Jean de Bebian on weekends.

His friend was struck by the similarity between some of the vineyards at Saint-Jean de Bebian and those at Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He toured the vineyards by foot, examining handfuls of soil, trying to determine the mineral composition. He studied the geological charts of the region. As time passed, he inspired Alain to look at what lay underfoot and finally convinced him that in terms of soil and climate he possessed something special. Alain became convinced that there was something that could be developed at Saint-Jean de Bebian, something that had to be developed—as Alain says, “a great growth which was sleeping, which was being ignored.”

In those days, according to Alain, the wine produced at the domaine had one important quality. It was désaltérant—a charming, thirst-quenching wine, easy to drink and enjoy. However, it lacked depth. It lacked length on the palate. It had no aging potential. And it lacked the intellectual appeal of a wine that results from a perfect marriage of cépage and terroir, grape variety and soil. It was what the French call a little wine.

Like the other vineyards of the Languedoc, Saint-Jean de Bebian was planted with high-yielding grape varieties. Convinced that he possessed a soil and climate capable of producing a wine of distinction, Alain decided to take the leap and rip out the old vineyards. Then, of course, the next question: Which grape varieties should be planted? With perfect logic, he looked to Châteauneuf-du-Pape for the grape varieties of which his wine would one day be composed.

If only it were that simple. Great wine is never simple. Great wine is the result of major factors such as Alain’s decision to replant, but it also depends upon a complexity of seemingly insignificant details that add up to what you smell and taste in the glass. Alain discovered that there are thirteen different grape varieties growing at Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Pinot Noir makes red Burgundy. Gamay makes Beaujolais. However, there is no one grape that makes Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

I recall sitting around the dinner table at Domaine Tempier a few years ago at Bandol, discussing the wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape with Lucien Peyraud and his two sons. We were praising this and that domaine, and one of the sons ventured the opinion that Domaine X made the finest wine of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Lucien frowned, shook his head no, and put up his hand to cut off the discussion. “Domaine X is 100 percent Grenache,” he said. “It does not have the thirteen cépages.” He popped out of his chair, disappeared out the door, and returned a few moments later, cradling a dusty old bottle in his arms. “This is the Baron Le Roy’s Châteauneuf,” he announced, “my last bottle of his 1961.”

It was the most marvelous Châteauneuf-du-Pape of my life. So much Châteauneuf is merely rich and heavy. This one had nuance, perfume, breed.

“Voilà!” said Lucien, “that’s it, the true Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of the thirteen cépages.”

Once upon a time, so the story goes, the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape were planted with thirteen different grape varieties. A blend of the juice of those thirteen grapes made the wine of the village. One gave color; another contributed a certain perfume; another, finesse, warmth, spice, and so on. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Châteauneuf-du-Pape had degenerated into little more than a blending wine for the big shipper companies up north in Beaune and Nuits-Saint-Georges. Except in rare hot years, Burgundy was considered deficient in color, weight, and alcohol, so they imported these qualities from sunny Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Adapting to the demands of this hungry, cash-rich market for their wines, the growers of Châteauneuf-du-Pape pulled out the grape varieties that produce finesse and bouquet and replanted the varietals that give dark color and high alcohol. Even today, you can buy shipper-bottled Burgundies that yield an aroma suspiciously reminiscent of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Alain, without a grand appellation, located in the Languedoc, where wine sells for practically nothing, decided to rip out his producing vines and replant the thirteen grape varieties of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. What a gamble, when you think about it, the investment of time, labor, and money, all necessarily begun years before the results could be tasted and judged. He risked everything in order to create something fine.

For Alain Roux, there are three factors involved in the effort to make fine wine. It is not as easy as some would have us believe. You don’t simply pick ripe grapes and use new French barrels.

The vinification is one factor, of course, and Alain’s experiments with vinification will probably never be concluded. It is not his style to stand still. The last time I saw him, we tasted a cuvée of his 1981, which had been aged in new oak barrels, a very expensive, unprofitable experiment for such an inexpensive wine as Saint-Jean de Bebian. He was not satisfied with the cuvée because he felt the oak dominated, obscuring the natural fruit aroma. He thinks aging in giant oak casks may be the answer because the large casks will give his wine an opportunity to breathe, making it rounder, with more depth on the palate, but leaving it without a strong taste of wood.

Factor number two is the proper marriage of soil, climate, and grape variety. Marriage is perhaps imprecise; it is a ménage à trois. Alain is satisfied that he has created a successful ménage à trois now that he has the thirteen grapes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape growing in his soil and climate. Would that more vintners in California were aware of Alain’s factor number two. The attitude in California often seems to be: “In our climate, everything ripens, so we can plant whichever grape variety we like. I think Château Latour makes the best wine in the world, so I’ll plant Cabernet Sauvignon.” Another likes the wines of Burgundy, so Pinot Noir is planted, right alongside his neighbor’s Cabernet or Riesling or Chenin Blanc or whatever. The curious thing is that, in terms of climate, Napa Valley most resembles southern France, yet efforts to grow Grenache, Mourvèdre, Cinsault, or other varietals from the warm climate zones of France are rare.

Factor number three is the precise mineral composition of the soil in which the vines find nourishment, and Alain has revolutionary ideas. With his best friend, enologue François Serre of Béziers, there is an ongoing analysis of the mineral composition of the soils at Saint-Jean de Bebian and of the soils of the finest sites in France.

As an example of his findings, François Serre uses the white Burgundy vineyards of Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet. You look at the adjoining vineyards of the two famous villages, and to the eye there is no difference. They are on the same level of the hillside, they are both planted in Chardonnay, and the climate is identical. Yet wine connoisseurs know, even if they cannot define it precisely in words, that there is a difference between the wine of Meursault and that of Puligny-Montrachet. François Serre analyzed soil samples from each site and discovered that there is one major difference. Meursault soil contains a mineral that is not found next door at Puligny. He is convinced that Meursault’s distinctive character and flavor are due to the presence of that mineral in Meursault’s soil. Everyone speaks of goût de terroir; François Serre says he has isolated one. He seems convinced that, by tilling this mineral into the earth at Puligny, a wine could be made there which would resemble Meursault.

Alain and François are convinced that great wine cannot be produced from soil that is deficient in certain mineral elements. You can have a noble grape variety, they claim, and the right climate, but if your soil lacks certain mineral elements, you will be left with a little wine, a superficial wine, no matter what method of vinification you employ. The laboratory analysis of soil samples from France’s grand cru vineyards is telling them what those mineral elements are and in what percentage they must be present. Alain firmly believes that any deficiencies in the soil at Saint-Jean de Bebian can be corrected by fortifying or adjusting the mineral composition.

When I asked Alain what his hopes are for the future at Saint-Jean de Bebian, he answered, “A wine better than Chave’s Hermitage. The day that I do as well as Chave, well, that will be something! Chave achieves such depth and length because of his soil. By adding phosphates, one can do better.”

Phosphates? I have heard all manner of theories about the secret of making great wine. Here was a new one, and I shuddered at the thought of Alain stirring chemicals into his wine vats. But no, he laughed, phosphates are tilled into the soil in order to enrich the quality of his wine.

“At Hermitage,” I said, “you have that one steep slope with its perfect southern exposure. Here you have all the little plots that are so varied as to soil and exposure.”

“At Hermitage,” Alain answered, “they have only two soil types, granite and limestone. That’s all. Here we have a myriad of types, so we can do better. Yes, there are problems, but once the questions are posed correctly, I’m convinced that we will be able to solve them.”

I am the first to admit that there are better wines than Alain’s Domaine de Saint-Jean de Bebian. If he had vines at Chambertin or Hermitage, one would take his success for granted because the quality of those sites has been proven over the centuries and from them we expect extraordinary wines. But Alain’s domaine is in the Languedoc. That is what gives his struggle a touch of the heroic.

And one can see from the 1984 Saint-Jean de Bebian that his gamble of yanking out his vineyards has paid off, that the terroir of the Languedoc possesses an unsuspected nobility, which was passing unnoticed amid the sheer volume of plonk that the region produces. The brilliant splash of purple in the glass is the first sign that you have something extraordinary. The aroma suggests thyme, fennel, black cherry, and black pepper. With an expressive personality that captures and sustains one’s interest after repeated tastings, it has the warmth and generosity of a wine from the sunny south, but it is not too heavy, too alcoholic, nor is it mean with tannin.

Recently, I opened one of my remaining bottles of 1981 Saint-Jean de Bebian. The aroma was wild, ripe, charged with herbs, exotic spices, and black truffle. It tasted like a top Châteauneuf-du-Pape with its stony goût de terroir, and the once chewy tannin had rounded out nicely. Violets and berry linger on the palate with a length normally reserved to the grand appellations.

Alain aims high. Many knowledgeable tasters consider Chave’s Hermitage the finest wine of southern France. Few winemakers would dare to mention their wine in the same breath with Chave’s. Alain dares, and although his 1981 is not on a level with Chave’s great Hermitage, it has already shaken up the wine world in France and blasted away preconceptions and prejudices about the wine of the Languedoc. It is not a little wine.

* * *

The roadways leading farther inland are lined with plane trees. Plots of vineyard are often bordered by rows of cypress. Rugged-looking mountains loom to the north. Faugères is a lazy little village whose robust red wine was recently elevated to its own separate appellation contrôlée. It consists of a few stone, tile-roofed houses shaded by the ever-present plane trees, which diminish the swelter of the Mediterranean sun. The streets seem always deserted. I have not seen a café, a bar, or even the inevitable tabac. The activity takes place in the cellars and vineyards. The winegrowers here are ignored, unspoiled, which means you will be received hospitably.

Then search your map for the Abbey de Valmagne near Villeveyrac, an awesome, part-Romanesque, part-Gothic cathedral in a wildly beautiful setting in the middle of nowhere, whose gigantic naves are currently filled with the largest wine casks I have ever seen. Under the guidance of Alain Roux’s friend François Serre, the abbey has begun replanting with nobler grape varieties like Syrah and Mourvèdre, and I intend to return in order to follow their progress. Recent vintages look promising. For the moment it is a fantastic place to combine one’s wine interest with the pleasures of sightseeing.

Also to be found in this part of the Languedoc, called the Hérault, is one of the most remarkable new wineries in the world, the Mas de Daumas Gassac, where the dynamic Aimé Guibert has created from what was garrigue, brush, and forestland a vineyard whose wine has captured the imagination of the wine press on both sides of the Atlantic.

Guibert’s very first vintage, his 1978 from new vines, burst upon the wine scene leaving behind a shower of sparkling accolades which have been surpassed only by the notes accorded to subsequent vintages.

If I am not mistaken, the French magazine Gault Millau made the first public sighting, calling Mas de Daumas Gassac “the Lafite of the Languedoc.”

As if such a paean could be improved upon, The Times of London reported that the wines are “actually more like Latour than Lafite … with their enormous colour and immense, hefty, tannic character.” Enormous color? Can color have size, bulging perhaps beyond the boundaries imposed by its vessel, in this case evidently a wineglass? I shouldn’t quibble because that sensational quote, “more like Latour than Lafite,” served me well when I introduced Daumas Gassac to the California market.

Robert Parker, in The Wine Advocate, says: “In flavor it reminds me of a 30/70 blend of a great Bordeaux from Graves, say La Mission-Haut-Brion, and a great Châteauneuf-du-Pape, say Vieux Télégraphe. Don’t miss it.”

The Underground Wineletter, noting that Mas de Daumas Gassac is largely Cabernet Sauvignon, said, “It may well be the very best buy for a wine of this type to be found anywhere in the U.S.… nothing from California comes close to this quality/price relationship.”

Such to-do is somewhat reminiscent of the debut of California Cabernets and Chardonnays on the world wine stage following the well-publicized results of a blind tasting of California and French wines hosted by Stephen Spurrier in Paris. All of a sudden, Cabernets from the Golden West were selling for twelve dollars, then twenty dollars, thirty dollars, even forty dollars per bottle. I recall one limited production California Chardonnay released to the public at fifty dollars per bottle! And why not? On one given night, didn’t one given California Chardonnay bolt from the pack and finish a nose ahead of a given white Burgundy, and wasn’t this horse race witnessed by Time?

And then it seemed as if every week a new superstar appeared from nowhere to beat Château Latour or some other great name in a blind tasting. How anyone can take a few swirls and sniffs and sips of two or more wines and pronounce a winner and a loser, can look at the wine and recognize its true breed … Oh well, I haven’t noticed Château Latour pleading for mercy. The truth will out over many years as corks are pulled on magnificent bottles of Latour and on an array of flat, dead, blind-tasting champions.

With handsome gray hair and astonishing aquamarine-blue eyes—lively, piercing eyes that say “Let’s go, let’s not tarry”—Aimé Guibert is the proprietor of Mas de Daumas Gassac. Father of five sons, Guibert has spent most of his working life running a large leatherworks company, supplying haute-couture shops around the world. He is not a native of the Languedoc, nor does he have a Languedocienne personality. He is brimming with capitalist energy and he brings that spirit to his business. However, his wife was born in the region. She is an ethnologist who is passionate about Celtic culture, so I feel right at home; in fact, a Lynch can claim roots here, thanks to the remains of a sixth century B.C. Celt settlement unearthed near Béziers.

Several years ago they acquired their beautiful property, their country home, between Gignac and Aniane. There were no vines around the old mas (farmhouse), but even grown wild, it was indeed a little piece of paradise covered with trees and herbs, spectacular vistas wherever you look, a running stream, and air redolent with that wild complex of aromas that can only be found in the Midi.

As if that were not enough, shortly after they acquired the property, a friend visited and remarked upon the site’s suitability for the propagation of the vine. This friend’s opinion was not taken lightly, for the words were uttered by none other than geologist/geographer/enophile Henri Enjalbert, author of at least fifteen respected books, including the remarkable chapter, “L’Origine de la Qualité,” in which one may read the following paragraph:

To define in a word the specific traits of a privileged viticultural terrain does not suffice to resolve the difficult problem of the genesis of the great wines. An in-depth analysis of these terrains—sites, soils, and subsoils—and a detailed history of the combined work of proprietors, managers, viticultural directors and cellar masters must be undertaken in a systematic way if we wish to understand each step in the elaboration of the great growths. But it must be pointed out that no one knew in advance which virtues a certain viticultural site (whose reputation is confirmed today) might be capable of producing. To empirically pursue, during dozens of years, the creation of a quality vineyard was a genuine adventure. It was necessary to grasp during the production the particular aptitudes of the soil and, at the same time, struggle on a double front to master the cultivation and the vinification: choice of grape varieties, system of pruning and farming practices on the one hand, how and when to pick the grapes, the production of the wine, and the techniques of conservation and aging on the other.

At the time of Enjalbert’s death in the early 1980s, he had begun a monograph on the subject of the soil at Mas de Daumas Gassac. It remained unfinished; nevertheless, Monsieur Guibert has published it in order to have a tangible scientific foundation for his claim that the wine of Daumas Gassac deserves the designation grand cru.

Daumas Gassac apparently has a geological formation unique in the Languedoc: chalky, friable, poor in humus, the bits of earth ranging in size from mere grains of sand to little stones, a soil similar in aspect, similar in constitution, to that of the Côte d’Or and the Italian Friuli.

Blessed with a microclimate that retards maturation a full fortnight after that of the vines on the broiling plain below, this piece of earth possesses qualities that have led Guibert to dedicate himself to the production of a grand cru in a land where heretofore none have existed.

An undertaking of such dimension would be greeted with a ho-hum in California, where Hollywood moguls in their spare time create wines to rival the grands crus of France, but in France itself it is unheard of—France, where domaines normally pass from father to son and tradition determines matters such as grape variety, cultivation, and vinification. What Guibert has set out to do simply is not done, creating something out of nothing, and creating something not at all typique de la région at that! And he has met with resentment, resistance, and jealousy from his neighbors. Remember, Guibert is an outsider to begin with. However, I have not seen any crinkles of worry on his face. If he has noticed, he doesn’t give a damn. But I have heard gossip in the cellars—Guibert may be unpopular, but not as a topic of conversation. For one thing, the locals ridicule his prices. I am not totally convinced that his neighbors would refuse were the same high prices offered for their wines.

The single most important decision was Guibert’s choice of grape variety. Going traditional in the Hérault would have meant planting varieties like Carignan, Grenache, and Cinsault. I asked him why he planted Cabernet Sauvignon in his “Burgundian” soil in the Languedoc.

“God’s inspiration,” he replied. (These vignerons in the Languedoc are not the most humble race I’ve encountered. At nine in the morning they speak with the pomp of an Irish poet after he’s had a few.)

“No,” he continued, “it was actually a matter of personal taste. I am not a partisan of the Pinot.”

Then, following the advice of enologue Emile Peynaud of Bordeaux, Guibert informed himself of the vinification practices in the chais of the grand cru classé of the Médoc. His fermentation proceeds at a controlled temperature lasting eighteen to twenty days in order to produce a vin de garde. The wine then ages fifteen to twenty months in barrel, some in new, some in used barrels purchased from Château Margaux and Palmer. It is fined with egg whites and bottled without filtration. In both his vinification and his cultivation, Guibert follows the strictest organic principles in order to produce a natural-tasting, healthy wine.

I must admit that I was not immediately swept away by Guibert’s creation. First, I have never been a partisan of the Cabernet Sauvignon. It has always seemed too easy, almost monotonous. The difference between a Vosne and a Chambolle has always intrigued me more than the difference between a Pauillac and a Saint-Estèphe, or between a Heitz and a Mondavi Cabernet.

Cabernet is a vine that seems to make a decent wine everywhere it ripens, from Spain to South Africa, from Chile to Australia. And the distinctions between big oak-aged Cabernet Sauvignons, be they Italian, French, Californian, or whatever, have never struck me as that fine. “All right, yet another one” would be my response, and that is how I responded when I first tasted Mas de Daumas Gassac. I knew it was a top example, and indeed you can match it against Cabernets from Opus One to Château Margaux, if that’s your pleasure, and the Daumas Gassac will be anything but humiliated. I knew I’d found something that would create a stir, but my attitude remained more commercial than passionate.

Cabernet Sauvignon is a variety whose flavor tends to dominate environmental factors, unlike the Pinot Noir, Syrah, or Mourvèdre, for example, which express environmental factors. I buy an Italian white wine from a vineyard in which the vines share space with locust trees, and one can smell the opulent perfume of their cascading white blossoms in the wine. It fills the air; it fills the wine. Tasters in the northern Rhône always find aubépine (hawthorn blossom) in a good young Hermitage; it is a plant that grows wild thereabouts. And the various aromatic qualities expressed by well-made red Burgundies is well documented. Burgundy, there we have something to get excited about. Look at the wines from the vineyards around Gevrey-Chambertin. Those vines grown in soil that contains a proportion of marl, such as Mazis-Chambertin, have a definite licorice aspect. Another Gevrey-Chambertin, “Les Cherbaudes,” communicates very little in the way of berries or fruit, but instead is very animal, almost like the smell of raw game. And right next door, at Clos de la Roche, there is a characteristic wild-cherry aroma that is not to be found in the wines of Gevrey.

However, except in rare circumstances (not nearly often enough if you ask me), Cabernet expresses only itself. Of course soil plays a part in the taste of Cabernet, but isn’t it normally in terms of the structure and weight of the wine? When one compares Lafite, Latour, and Margaux, doesn’t one notice primarily the difference in size, in tannin, in finesse?

The most impressive development at Daumas Gassac is the adaptation of the Cabernet Sauvignon to its environment. As the vines mature, that dominating Cabernet taste, so presumptuous in the 1978 and 1980, has gone from forte to piano, and one finds instead all those wild aromas with which the air there is charged. They are present in the 1983, a sensual, aromatic delight that shocks the senses by virtue of its originality and seems to penetrate right into one’s bloodstream.

Normally I tend toward tradition, and that tendency may have blinded me at first to the adventure (“the miracle,” says Guibert) taking place at Daumas Gassac. With the arrival of each new vintage, as the vines adapt, as their roots dig deeper into the earth, I find myself more and more amazed by the results.

There are many possible futures here. Will this be the first grand cru of the Languedoc, as Monsieur Guibert hopes? He is certainly expending a good proportion of his herculean energy to that end. Will he, with his capitalist temperament, wind up seduced by the economic potential the journalists have created? Will it lead him to overproduce? Right now, he permits a low yield per acre entirely in line with the Médoc’s grand cru classé. Or will it lead him to plant vines on those less desirable sites surrounding his domaine, and to blend their wine in with the cream? The adventure continues at the Mas de Daumas Gassac.

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I am always in a rush. As pleasurable as my business is, there is too much territory to cover. Hotel life makes me particularly anxious to get back home, so it is always onward to the next cellar. But if I were you I would stay and search these rustic meridional villages for that perfect inn, and I would spend a week or two exploring and hanging out.

When you do leave, you might enjoy a stop in Nîmes to see its Roman ruins, some of which are in remarkably good condition. It was at Nîmes that Henry James noted “a certain contagion of antiquity in the air.” However, times have changed since his visit. There is a depressing difference between the reality today, those ancient Roman structures standing amid the contagion of garbage contributed by our own century, and the view of those same structures as seen in old etchings, where they stand nobly within their environment.

I wandered into Nîmes’s Temple of Diana and happened upon two Norwegian-looking punks, tourists, one of whom chomped his chewing gum cudlike while he relieved himself upon a graffiti-covered Gallo-Roman pillar. I found it difficult to lose myself in pondering Henry James’s criticism of Roman architectural efforts. He wrote: “The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained.” It takes a Henry James to dare criticize such masterpieces in the first place. Most of us standing before them react with simple awe, despite the croque-monsieur concessions alongside.

Hoping you will not apply James’s critique to my effort to introduce you to the wines of the Languedoc, I will not, because of my bad experience, suggest that you skip Nîmes, although you are not far from Avignon and Gigondas, Vaison-la-Romaine, Aix, and Cassis. But there will be some who decide it might have been better to sit back home enjoying a glass of gris de gris, scolding themselves for missing those ruins at Nîmes while their imagination, excited by the fruit of the vine, conjures up pristine images of magnificent Roman theaters, temples, and colosseums.