A Fantastic Vision

It was the early 1970s and Aimé and Véronique Guibert were house hunting in the South of France and happened on an old, abandoned farmhouse in a rural location a few miles from the small town of Aniane in the Languedoc.  A friend, a professor of geology, looked at the land and recommended that it would be ideal for a vineyard and that the wines produced there could be very good indeed.  The problem was that, as there was no history of winemaking there, any wine produced there could only be sold as ‘Table Wine’, a category normally attracting little attention and only rock-bottom prices.

But the Guiberts were not deterred; they bought 17,000 Cabernet Sauvignon cuttings from some of the top Bordeaux properties and built an underground cellar next to the farmhouse.  They clearly meant to do this properly.  Their first vintage, 1978, made with assistance from top oenologist, Emile Peynaud, was bottled in 1980 under the name of the farmhouse, Mas de Daumas Gassac.  It was mainly Cabernet Sauvignon with a little Malbec, Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir and Tannat added.  Only 4 years later, the 1982 vintage was hailed by the French wine press as the ‘Château Lafite of the Languedoc’ and its reputation has been sky-high ever since.  Despite that, because of its location, it is still only classified as an IGP wine (aka Vin de Pays), a step up from a Table Wine but less prestigious than Appellation Contrôlée.

You rarely see mature examples for sale, so we were extremely lucky that a very generous friend shared with us a bottle of the 2012 vintage that had been carefully laid down in her cellar for a number of years.  A rich beef casserole with dried cranberries, chestnuts and mushrooms proved the ideal accompaniment bringing out the wine’s great complexity including a wonderful array of black fruit flavours combined with cleverly restrained oak.  Beautifully soft and harmonious and barely showing its 10 years of age, this is a wine that still tastes young and fresh and will be drinking perfectly well into the next decade.

M.Guibert sadly died in 2016 but the vineyard is now safely in the hands of 4 of their children and so the wines live on, a continuing reminder of one couple’s fantastic vision.

A Happy Return

It’s been a long time – more than 2 years in fact – since I was last able to blog about the Bristol Tasting Circle, a local group of wine enthusiasts and professionals who, until Covid intervened, met monthly, inviting winemakers or independent wine merchants to talk to us and share their wines. 

Happily, we have recently been able to revive the format and our first guests were Tim and Jill North of Hampshire-based Joie de Vin who brought along a selection of interesting bottles from the south of France for us to taste.  Joie de Vin (www.joiedevin.co.uk) focus solely on French wines and seek out artisan growers who make their own wine in small quantities.  All their producers work sustainably, many are organic, some biodynamic and their passion for their products shines through. 

Everyone present had their own favourites but I must mention Domaine Laurens who have a great way with naming: one of their reds translates as ‘like a Sunday under a cherry tree’!

It’s hard to choose just one or two from the bottles we tasted, but a white and a red from the same producer, stood out for me.  Domaine La Toupie is based close to the village of Maury in the foothills of the Pyrennees and uses Macabeu, better known in Spain than France (Viura, the grape of white Rioja, is the same variety), to make a delicious, mouth-filling, tangy, peachy food-friendly white (‘Solo’, £14.95).

La Toupie’s red, Quatuor, (£17.50) is a blend of 4 varieties well-known in this area: Grenache, Syrah, Carignan and Mourvedre.  A soft, chunky wine (15% alcohol, but well-balanced, so there’s no alcoholic ‘burn’) with great complexity and flavours of ripe black fruit, cassis and lovely cinnamon spice from the subtle oak ageing.  The 2017 that we tasted, although delicious now, would certainly benefit from a couple more years in bottle.

It’s difficult to convey how good it was to get back to the Tasting Circle after all this time and the wines from Joie de Vin and Tim’s presentation made us all realise just how much we had missed.