The ruined castle perches atop a five-tiered staircase of limestone, its towering donjon dominating the ridgeline: an eyrie over the Agly Valley far below; a stone fortress guarding the westernmost reaches of Corbières behind. It once scraped medieval skies; choughs still tumble about it as they did about Macbeth’s castle, the air echoing with their wheezy cries.
This is Château de Quéribus: built by Catalans in the 11th century, soon serving as a northern frontier post for what was always an open border, furrowed by shepherds’ paths. During the 13th century, it became one of the last Cathar refuges, after the tragic fall of Montségur; the final ‘perfects’ slipped away south in 1255. It subsequently served the French as one of the ‘five sons of Carcassonne’: a chain of castles marking the French-Aragonese border. With the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, though, Roussillon (or French Catalonia) passed from Aragonese to French control. The border itself slipped away south.
The wines of the Agly Valley are explosive, packed with solar force
It may no longer mark a frontier, but Quéribus is still the best vantage point I know from which to distinguish Roussillon’s terroirs from those of Languedoc. The wines of the Agly Valley (Maury, Maury Sec and Côtes du Roussillon-Villages) are explosive, packed with solar force; it’s a favoured spot in France’s south, too, to search for the non-fruity flavours we call ‘mineral’. Roussillon offers further nuance with its other great table-wine-growing zone: that of Collioure. The dark schists that tumble down from vineyards into the sea here are the reason why this Côte is not azure but ‘Vermeille’ – vermilion. The seaside restaurants of Collioure itself, candlelit on summer nights, gleam like fireflies on the dark sea verge.
Quéribus itself, though, fronts the Corbières commune of Cucugnan – a pretty hilltop village where a working windmill still grinds grain for the village bakery. The wines of this part of Corbières (some of the best made now by the late Peter Sichel’s grandson Alexander) are, thanks to altitude and a switch in geological tempo, light, even delicate. Intriguingly, too, Maury and Cucugnan are less than 30 miles from Quillan and the Upper Aude Valley, home to Limoux – one of Languedoc’s coolest zones, and the source of its finest sparkling wines.
These rapid and dramatic transitions are typical of Languedoc (whose 10,569 sq miles make it bigger than Wales). This former French province begins at Fitou and Leucate – and ends at Arles, as the Rhône dissipates its waters in the lagoons and marshes of the Camargue.
In one sense, Languedoc’s is an easy landscape for wine lovers to understand. You’ll find the French Mediterranean’s biggest coastal plain here: home not only to most of the Languedoc’s population, but source of most of its wine (IGP Pays d’Oc alone accounts for half of Languedoc-Roussillon’s total production of 240,000 ha). There are some appellation stars on the plain – notably Languedoc’s most successful export white, the hauntingly lemony Picpoul de Pinet, produced within sight of the glittering oyster beds of the Etang de Thau. The scented Vin Doux Naturel Muscats of Frontignan and Lunel turn sunlight into scent, and there are fine reds from stony Grés de Montpellier, Languedoc’s newest AOC.
It's in the hills that clamber up from the plain, though, that you’ll find most of Languedoc’s appellation wines, in arrestingly intricate scenery – and often in splendid isolation, surrounded by thyme-strewn garrigue, punctuated by cade, mastic and holm oaks. And little else. Viticulture seems so suited to this wilderness landscape as to be half-necessary, as if the play of vineyard and scrub was nature’s intention – especially when draped in the slow gold of a summer dusk.
But the hills keep rising and rising – up through the old chestnut forests, eventually reaching the high limestone plateaux of the Grands Causses. These austere uplands are gouged and incised by dramatic gorges, where winegrowers once found sunny patches on the steep slopes to grow wine for local tables. That’s all lost now – though a few pioneers, encouraged by a warming climate, are trying the uplands to make fresh, percussive whites.
a seductively chaotic mass of ever-changing slopes and valleys
If you love Languedoc red wines, your biggest challenge will be understanding the nuances of those hill appellations. They all lie in the same biotope; they’re a seductively chaotic mass of ever-changing slopes and valleys; and the red wines all draw on the same small pool of varieties. We’ll need decades – or a change in AOC rules – for their distinctive terroir characteristics to emerge. Syrah seems to perform most tellingly in the east, notably in appellations like Pic St Loup and Terrasses du Larzac; there are some magnificently dense wines from the central hill zone, in Saint- Chinian and Faugères, while plush fruit characters are often richest in the western appellations like Minervois and La Clape. Beyond high Limoux lie the halfway-house appellations of Cabardès and Malpère: a point of liaison, both topographically and in terms of grape varieties, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
This region, vast and enigmatic, has been my home for 15 years now – longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I’m beginning, just beginning, to understand it.
