Wine Discovery

I awoke at 3am with the wind whipping the curtains in and out of the window. It was hot and humid and sweaty and unpleasant. I closed the window and put on the air cooler instead and thankfully went back to sleep until 6.30am.

I felt alert and bright and ready to go, which made a change from the last few days. So I got up and spent and hour and a half bringing the ironing up to date in the calm and quiet of the early morning. It was still hot but the wind had vanished and with it the oppressiveness which had been overbearing for the last few days - quite remarkable really what a difference it made. Today was hot, but just a normal hot mid-thirties Languedoc day - it felt totally different to the last three days.

I have been offering clients the opportunity to go on wine tours with a company called Vin-en-Vacances, which is run by an English lady, Wendy Gedney. The feedback has been excellent and I was keen to try one of her tours myself.

I have had no clients this week so today presented an ideal opportunity. As it turned out she had no other clients either (strangely quiet for the end of July), so she suggested a voyage of discovery to new wine estates to add to her itinerary which I was quite happy about too.

Over the course of the day we visited three domaines in the Corbieres and had lunch at an excellent restaurant - which is what I would call a good day out.

Our first target was a disappointment though because we couldn't find Domaine Notre Dame in Fabrezans, despite having the address and stopping and getting directions. No signpost, no adverts, no chance of guessing which stone house it might be. How do these people expect potential clients to find them? We gave up and went on to the next one.

This also didn't start promisingly. In the pretty village of Ferriols we found the tasting room for Domaine Grand Lauze. It was closed and locked up and the posters in the window were old and faded. There was a number to call for 'degustation', which we did - a brief conversation, a ten minute wait and M Xavier Ledogar arrived and opened up.

He proved that it is worth persevering. Several days stubble, inappropriate very short football shorts but the leanness and tan of a man who spends his life in the vineyards, the enthusiasm of a man totally in love with his craft and the charm of a Frenchman - and he was called Xavier - Debrah would have loved him.

We tasted four of his wines, all produced biodynamically by him and his brother, Mathieu, from vineyards handed down from generation to generation - some of his Carignan vines were 100 years old. He then drove us up to the rocky hilltop vineyards where falcons swooped over the land and the heat and the noise of the cicadas were both unrelenting. He discussed the weather and the 'terrior' and the phases of the moon and showed us the vineyard where the land was ploughed by horse not machine and everything was done by hand. He talked about restoring the old ruin of a building and living there with a vegetable plot and animals, especially donkeys, in the midst of his vineyards.

Finally he drove us back into the village to the 'Cave' which dated from 1905 with it's old, now unused concrete vats and the new steel ones, the oak barrels and the bags of natural herbs that they use in sprays to stop mildew and other diseases - no synthetic chemicals at all. In one corner there was an odd array of crates and bottles, some without tops but clearly full of something. "C'est mon pere", he said - he likes to make a bit of sparkling wine and a couple of the tops have burst off with the gas, which Xavier carefully retrieved and replaced - good old Dad, I thought, still knocking out a bit of home brew on the side for private consumption.

And that was that - fascinating. When we mentioned that we were heading into Conilhac for lunch at Auberge Côté Jardin, he told us to ask for Sophie and drove out of town to show us the lane that was a shortcut direct to the restaurant.

The Auberge Côté Jardin is trying very hard to be something more than an inn and restaurant in the small town where it is located. I would say that they are trying to win a Michelin star and I think they are doing a very good job. The food was excellent but a little pretentious a la Michelin, the service good and the setting lovely - it is a great discovery and whilst it has the potential to be pricey, you could eat there very well on a midweek lunchtime very reasonably - as indeed we did today.

Next was Chateau du Vieux Parc, which turned out to be about 500m from the restaurant in the centre of Conilhac. A beautiful old house, five generations of the same family, an old cave with concrete vats where the fermentation takes place, a new cave with steel vats for storage and a fantastic new cellar lined with oak barrels. Apparently they have barrels from five different coopers and the resultant wine is a mix of the wines from each of the five which gives a greater complexity - as if wine making isn't difficult enough anyway!

Between the caves and the house was the old park (hence the name) - a beautiful stretch of overgrown but tended woodland park, right in the centre of town - quite a majestic private garden really with statues set amongst the trees. It felt very Victorian, or whatever the French equivalent is - Grand Siecle I guess.

Our final destination was a chateau that we had spotted in the morning on our way to Fabrezan. It just looked curious and was obviously a wine estate but we saw no signs for 'vente' or 'degustation' so were a little hesitant as we approached up the driveway.

Chateau Cabriac turned out to be a wonderful find. The chateau dated from the C11th and was the site of a priory of the templars - a stone cross on the site is used on the labels. The ancestors of the current owners bought it after the Revolution when all the church lands were dissolved (stolen), which basically meant that the state took them over and then sold them back to the previous owners who were in fact the rightful owners anyway (alledgedly). Whatever.

The fabulous lady that came out to greet us from the 16 bedroom chateau could easily have been a duchess or countess from an English country estate. She was totally, charming, very intelligent, spoke very good English and was a bit bonkers in a very very lovely way.

What a find though - seven different types of AOC Corbieres wines of all shades and another seven VdP single cepage wines produced from 100 hectares of vines. What is remarkable is that, as with the previous domaines, it seemed to be run by just two people, a husband and wife, two brothers etc. This was a huge estate and a huge chateau with an enormous number of outbuildings and houses and yet we saw just two people - the husband winemaker and the eccentric wife. It really is a labour of love.

Needless to say I bought some wine from each of them. They all gave so much of their time and of themselves that you sort of feel obliged to buy something from them - but equally you wouldn't know they were there - you could easily drive past and ignore them as I'm sure many people do.

As indeed I have done in the past. Wendy showed me that you can just turn up at these places and the enthusiastic owners are more than willing to talk for ever about their wines. It also showed me that my French isn't as bad as I think it is - it's a damn sight better than Wendy's and I think she got far more out of it because of my presence than she would have on her own.

At least she recognised that and has invited me out again on a proper tour day with clients so that I can experience that too - I'm looking forward to it.