Wines Without Borders

Borders are funny things. In principle, they’re nothing more than lines drawn on a map – perimeters of the imagination. But the frontier I’ve just driven across clearly means something to John Bojanowski, the tall American-born winemaker sandwiched into the passenger seat of my compact French automobile. “This is the end of the Minervois appellation. Right here,” he declares in a Kentucky drawl blended with a touch of Parisian bite, then aged 15 years in the Languedoc, this sun-baked corner in the south of France.

Just outside the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) Minervois ­we reach a field of youngish vines planted 10 years ago by John and his wife Nicole, a Frenchwoman who grew up just down the hill from the couple’s Clos du Gravillas winery, in Saint-Jean-de-Minervois. This gravelly plot was an old hunting preserve before the Bojanowskis tore up two hectares of dry garrigue forest; a metal fence sunk 30 centimetres into the rocks keeps out early-harvesting wild boar. “It’s stupid to say that this isn’t Minervois,” says John, snacking on a handful of red mourvèdre grapes. “Somebody made a map and knew the guy who owned that silty plot we passed back there but decided, ‘Nobody has grapes up there, so we won’t bother.’ And so when we planted our attitude was, screw appellation. We don’t need it anyway.”

The idea of defying appellations is downright shocking to the average French person, to whom the origin of agricultural products (cheeses, lentils, livestock, red peppers) means everything. Non-appellation wines ­– such as the Languedoc staples Vin de Pays (“country wine”) and Vin de Table (“table wine”) ­– carry a blue seal on top of the bottle that screams, “I’m not worthy!” But in this disparate territory (at 300,000 hectares, the vineyards in Languedoc-Roussillon cover an area that’s more than twice the size of Bordeaux and larger than the wine-growing regions of Australia and South Africa combined), the most forward-looking vintners have realized that it’s precisely because of the region’s diversity of terroir and its lack of noble reputation that they can experiment with making great wine without worrying about the rules. Take the trail-blazing Mas de Daumas Gassac. Founded by Aimé and Véronique Guibert in 1971 outside the tiny village of Aniane, 35 kilometres northwest of Montpellier, this domaine has been dubbed “the Grand Cru of the Languedoc.” It sells its wines (one red, one white, one sparkling rosé and one late harvest wine) for upwards of $25 a glass in some of New York’s top restaurants.

And yet the bottle of 2007 Mas de Daumas Gassac red that Samuel Guibert (Aimé and Véronique’s eldest son) opens for us in the upstairs tasting room of the old Gassac Mill bears the dreaded Vin de Pays on the label and the blue seal on top. “What do you think?” he asks, raising his bushy black eyebrows. The first sip reminds me immediately of a Bordeaux: full-bodied, opulent but with a good acidity and chock full of chewy tannins (they use 75 percent cabernet sauvignon, rounded out by 18 other pan-European varietals). I tell him this doesn’t taste like a “country wine.” Then I decide that the second mouthful is just too good to spit into the carved stone sink.

“We are actually in the appellation,” he says. In fact Mas de Daumas Gassac predates the creation of the AOC Coteaux du Languedoc (now called AOC du Languedoc) by 14 years. But the authors of the appellation’s 1985 decree decided not to endorse cabernet sauvignon as an accepted varietal, essentially declaring that the vineyard’s cabernet-driven style was wrong. “We could make appellation wine, if we pulled up our own vines and planted syrah and mourvèdre instead,” Guibert says. “But we don’t need it, because the brand name Mas de Daumas Gassac has created its own appellation in people’s minds.”

Before taking over his father’s winery alongside his two brothers, Guibert lived and studied in New Zealand, focusing on that country’s novel approach to making and marketing wine. “You hear ‘New World region of the Old World’ a lot, but I would call the Languedoc the Land of Opportunity,” he says. “In a way, here you can do whatever you want.”

After a couple days wandering through vineyards and breathing in the lavender and thyme of the garrigue forest, I come across another New World disciple: Richard Lavanoux, head oenologist of Michel Laroche/Mas La Chevalière in Béziers, an hour’s drive west of Montpellier. He learned the basics of winemaking in the Languedoc before perfecting his craft in Australia, South Africa and Chile – countries where it matters less where your wine is from and more what it tastes like. “When you say Bordeaux, it’s Bordeaux,” he says as we stroll among the gargantuan stainless steel tanks of Laroche’s ultramodern production space. “People don’t really know what goes into it, but they already have a pretty good idea what Bordeaux’s about. With a Languedoc? Not really.”

In fact, you may be drinking more Languedoc than you realize. FAT bastard, Arrogant Frog and Red Bicyclette, for instance, succeed outside France by not explicitly branding themselves as Languedoc. One of Lavanoux’s advantages in producing Vin de Pays is that he can use a single grape varietal, something you can’t do within the AOC du Languedoc. (The 2007 Laroche Pinot Noir, a juicy red with notes of cassis and leather, is one of the bestselling wines in Quebec’s SAQ stores.) Another plus is that a Vin de Pays can be a blend of grapes from any area in the Languedoc (a trick vintners use to improve complexity), while an AOC wine is restricted to a specific smaller region. Rules are rules.

But even for the purest of Languedocien rebels, nothing’s cut and dried. While John and Nicole Bojanowski were waiting for their hunting preserve in Saint-Jean-de-Minervois to bear fruit, Nicole bought a 90-year-old plot with carignan and grenache gris, a Spanish varietal, inside the Minervois boundaries. “Nicole wanted to make a light summery rosé from the grenache gris,” John says between mouthfuls of this pink-skinned grape. But the alcohol levels were going to be too high for a rosé, so they pressed it as a white instead. “We submitted it as grenache, and grenache blanc is accepted by the appellation,” says John. The expert panel sampled the wine. It was approved.

“Suddenly, we’re being tasted by all the big wine reviews of France,” says John. Nicole’s wine, still Clos du Gravillas’ only one to be certified as AOC Minervois, was rechristened L’Inattendu (“the unexpected”) and the 2010 edition of Bettane & Desseauve’s influential guide named it one of the Languedoc’s seven best whites. “The blend has some actual grenache blanc, and it’s got maccabeu, which is accepted, too. But we don’t tell anybody that it’s also got terret.”

I remind John that, despite the fact he’s been generously sharing his grapes and wine, my tape recorder is still running and he’s just potentially confessed to a questionable varietal. “Well, I don’t think it would make any difference,” he says defiantly. “And really, now, I don’t care.”

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