Andrew Jefford
Come May, it will be 10 years since my family and I moved to the Languedoc. I feel guilty for not having explored it more thoroughly; columnists, though, have to roam widely. My colleague Rosemary George MW (whose useful Wines of the Languedoc was published in 2018) knows it better than I do, so I always enjoy comparing notes – and tramping the hills – with Rosemary and her husband Christopher. A couple of tastings last year, though, gave me the chance to think more deeply about progress in this part of the world.
One of these was a survey of vintage 2010 from Pic St-Loup (24 samples), St-Chinian
(29 samples) and Roussillon (37 samples), to see how they had aged. That was our first summer here, and it may well have been the best of the last 10 – though vintages in Languedoc and Roussillon don’t soar and dip as dramatically as they do further north in Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Were these wines worth keeping? Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask, as I don’t revere old wine for its own sake – I like the taste and texture of tannin (more palpable in young reds than old), and I enjoy the exuberance and energy of youth. Yes, it’s worth keeping top Bordeaux because of its gratifying modulations – a softening of its fierce sinews, its amplification of articulacy, the acquisition of harmonies hidden in youth, and sometimes (especially on the Right Bank) a metamorphosis ‘into something rich and strange’.
It’s worth keeping certain Burgundies (and the best Barolo, Brunello and Chianti Classico) for the continuing process of refinement, polish and acquisition of aromatic intricacy which these wines undergo. I don’t see similar benefits as wines from Languedoc or Roussillon are aged, though many of them hold well and in that sense resist time. Since they’re not forbidding when young, though, why wait?
I scored all the 2010 wines, and suggest that a score of 91 or more means that a wine is just beginning to tiptoe into fine-wine territory. There were five wines of this sort in the Pic St-Loup cohort (21%), three among the St-Chinians (10%) and 12 among the Roussillons (32%). St-Chinian has clearly progressed since 2010 and many of my favourite domaines there (like Vivien Roussignol and Marie Toussaint’s Domaine des Païssels) weren’t operative in 2010.
Pic St-Loup has a finesse, an elegance and a freshness which evades other Languedoc zones (two wines scored 93: Mas Bruguière’s La Grenadière and Château l’Euzière’s Les Escarboucles). I didn’t taste Terrasses du Larzac on this occasion, but know from other tastings that this is a key quality zone for Languedoc, led by the magnificent Mas Jullien and Mas Cal Demoura, both of which strike me as contenders for Languedoc first-growth status. Faugères and La Clape can be outstanding, too, though for very different reasons: Faugères for its highland asperities, and La Clape for its sensuality and succulence.
Roussillon, though, would be where I’d set about hunting for absolute grandeur of the sort which might one day rival... well, I was going to write Bordeaux and Burgundy, but in truth it makes more sense to compare Roussillon to Priorat in Spain and even Napa in California. It’s strong, solar, powerful. Its plethora of different rock types (vines grow in weathered stone here, as they do in Priorat and in the Douro, Portugal) seem mysteriously configured in its best wines, lending them the balance and dignity which it would be inappropriate to ask of acidity.
There were outstanding 2010s from a number of domaines (Boudau, Clos des Fées, des Chênes, Dom Brial, Gardiés, ThunevinCalvet, Treloar). Top spot, though, was taken by the magnificent and too-little-known Clos del Rey: midnight-black wine, spice-sweet scents like a slab of soft liquorice whacked down on cold marble, then pure, long and shockingly intense fruit flavours through which that stony strangeness drifted like fine rain. It had, in truth, barely aged at all.