Featured Region: Languedoc-Roussillon
DID YOU KNOW
Languedoc-Roussillon is France’s largest wine producing region, with almost one-third of all French wines produced here. The region is also responsible for producing around 10% of the Rosé on the planet!
As rosy-fingered-dawn rose over civilization in the Western World, it was often Greeks who brought viticulture, the gift of twice-born Dionysus, to new locales around the Mediterranean. Following unknowing in the footsteps of Gauls, galleys bearing Greeks first crossed the wine-dark sea in 600 BC. They settled first in Marseilles (then: Μασσαλία) where they then spread through what is now Languedoc-Roussillon, the region of this month’s wines. The first real vineyards were likely in what is now the Pays d’Oc region, where your first wine comes from. It is a mix of Grenache, Syrah and Carignan. The last being a noble grape with its own storied history. Known as Carae in ancient Rome, its name comes from the village of Cariñena in Aragon where it has been drank since the 3rd century BC, when the locals enjoyed it mixed with honey (another Greek invention: οἰνόμελι). It was the Romans and not the Greeks who really established serious viticulture in this month’s wine region though, in 118 BC with the establishment of Narbonne (although back then we would have called it “Narbo”, the colloquial term), the
November 2023
first permanent Roman settlement in France (then, of course: Gaul). Narbonne became the capital of the new expansion, and then a key stop on the Via Domitia, the first Roman road in Gaul, connecting Italy with Spain and passing through the entirety of the Pays d’Oc wine region. Vineyards were established all along the road, helping fuel the Roman army, and its new settlements across the Mediterranean. All of this to say: while Languedoc-Roussillon, and this month’s wines, are certainly French, they are also resolutely Mediterranean and European in a very deep and ancient way that transcends recent political boundaries. The region, and its wines and its grapes, are the link between their progenitors in Greece, their Roman ancestors, and the bridge between ancient and modern incarnations of Italy, France and Spain. The above-mentioned Carignan, along with Grenache (originally from Spain), Syrah (indigenous to the area), Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay (both from Burgundy) are the stars this month, but all having local varieties that show off the terroir and style of the Mediterranean coast. We think all four wines are brilliant examples of the place, and evoke, we hope, some of the deep and continuous history of the region.
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