Andrew Jefford
‘Guibert moved the region forward in a way locals would never have’
St-Guilhem-le-DeSert iS a ribbon-like medieval village in the languedoc, squeezed into a narrow side-valley of the river hérault, surrounded by a towering chaos of rocky hills and unplanted forest. it was there, a week ago, shaded from the bright may sunlight by the enormous, companionable plane tree planted in the mid-19th century in the village square, that i waited, with the Guibert family and other mourners from the languedoc wine world, for the coffin of aimé Guibert. the bell of the abbaye Gellone tolled slowly. the limestone peaks and cliffs returned no echo, but they held the sound for a while.
in the dark, thin abbey, most of aimé Guibert’s nine surviving children bade farewell to their father, the tilted coffin facing them as they spoke. the rest of us listened, moved; we fingered our own memories as the prayers and music came and went.
Once outside again, the mourners talked. ‘he was our booster,’ smiled Olivier Jullien of mas Jullien. ‘he moved the region forward in a way the locals would never have been able to do,’ added Domaine d’aupilhac’s Sylvain Fadat. ‘he showed us what was possible.’
local wine merchant alain martin, who’d given me a lift to the funeral, observed: ‘he helped the languedoc gain 10 years.’ alain razungles, professor of oenology at montpellier Supagro, recalled the words of his own father after visiting Guibert in the early years: ‘the wines are good and the vineyards are very good,’ he’d concluded. ‘But the man is outstanding.’
he’d been born to leather; part of the glovemaking aristocracy of millau, up in the Causses. in its heyday, Guibert Frères employed one-twentieth of the town’s population. the international abandonment of the glove as a fashion item, and a change in circumstances as he began a new family with his second wife, university ethnologist Véronique de la Vaissière, saw the couple buy an old house and land in 1970 near aniane, from the Daumas household of two spinsters and their unmarried brother. Chance set the debutant winegrowers planting not local varieties but (on best Bordeaux advice) Cabernet Sauvignon plus a small library of others. Guibert’s own genius for marketing and communication meant he immediately and personally attacked the international press with confidence and articulacy, at a time when they were amply receptive to a new message from old languedoc. the press loved him, and found the wines good; they trumpeted his ‘grand cru of the languedoc’ line. Dazzling and rapid export success for mas de Daumas Gassac followed.
i use the word ‘attacked’ advisedly. Guibert was a natural combatant and campaigner; his letters to customers, and his back labels, hammered his key messages home with pugnacious effectiveness. he proved a highly effective adversary to the mondavi family’s project to create a winery near aniane – disastrously so, in my view. When i wrote as much, aimé Guibert sent me an impeccably drafted letter of lofty fury, accusing me of being ‘a friend who had betrayed him’. he could say ridiculous things with the kind of grave conviction and succinct articulacy that made people pay attention, as Jonathan Nossiter delightedly discovered for his agitprop film Mondovino, in which aimé Guibert declares that ‘wine is dead’ and modern Bordeaux is of no interest.
None of this matters much, in truth, when put alongside Guibert’s great achievement, which was to make the wine world take the languedoc seriously. he was the archetypical outsider, and his life illustrates the value of outsiders – to do and to see things differently, to ignore obstacles, to attract attention, to ask difficult questions, to reinterpret and reinvent. mas de Daumas Gassac is certainly the least ‘typical’ of all of the languedoc’s fine red wines (as outlined in my Decanter column of June 2014), but its continuing existence, and the affection it inspires among long-term followers, not only underlines the fact that propitious terroir need not be interpreted in one way alone, but also stresses the role of aesthetic vision, courage and self-belief in wine creation. that is aimé Guibert’s legacy – in languedoc, and beyond.