The Place
“Some of the Greatest Vineyard Land in the South of France”
Writing for the Financial Times in 2009, Andrew Jefford detailed the epic battle at the turn of a millennium between Aimé Gilbert and Robert Mondavi who wished to make a ‘grand cru’ in the nearby scrubland. One of the biggest wine battles of the century.
On reviewing the estate for the first time there, he describes how:
‘Some of the greatest vineyard land in the south of France did indeed lie close to hand – but not exactly where the Mondavis thought it did.’
He continues:
‘Head for the least geologically showy part of the appellation: the central benchlands of flat but well drained limestone gravels.’
It is here, on the Bois de Pauliau (0.424 hectares) and Belle Fiolle/Bellefeuille (0.4 hectares), that the Matissat cuvée is grown.
Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve spoke of the area with the words:
‘This sector very much deserves a status apart. A terroir. A real one.’
“In the foothills of the Plateau de Larzac…”
‘A Medoc of the South’
The soils are deep gravelly quaternary alluvium – set down here over the same period, and in the same way, as those in the Médoc, Graves, Saint Emilion, or Pomerol – but just on a different side of the Massif Central. Instead of the Gironde you have the Hérault river…
As Andrew Jefford, again, writing for Decanter magazine on his visit to the estate observed:
“Every time I get a chance to taste these wines, they bring me uncommon pleasure. They are concentrated, perfumed, fleshy, heady, allusive and beguiling. Every bottle is drained to the last drop. As I polish the glasses afterwards, I begin looking forward to the next time. They could be the work of a genius.”
“Something hereabouts, in the benchlands of Terrasses du Larzac, works very well indeed. My last visit came after two days of huge rain, but there wasn’t a drop of standing water to be seen: the deep glacial rubble had swallowed, and digested, the lot. It’s stony, but not austere; it’s bright but ventilated.
He finished: “it feels almost Médoc-like.” (Link)
The Terrasses du Larzac, in the inland hills of the northern Hérault, overlaps in two villages with that of Roquefort – France’s oldest and the world’s first appellation (1925).
Here, the in the villages of Pégairolles-de-l’Escalette and Octon, the grazing of Lacaune, Manech, and Basco-Béarnaise ewes for the production of Roquefort cheese occurs alongside the growing of Grenache, Syrah, and Mouvedre for Terrasses du Larzac wine.
After that the culture of the olive and the vine peter out and are replaced with the grazing of sheep and cattle, the making of cheese, and – eventually – forests of Oak, Chestnut and Pine.
“The deep alluvial fan that is the basis for this site is only barely tilted, as it might be in St. Helena or Rutherford, St.-Estephe or Pomerol”
“Many observers in the Languedoc-Roussillon believe the vineyards/terroirs located in the sector…in and around the village of St.-Andre de Sangonis produce some of the finest wines of the region.”
Robert Parker Wine Advocate 1998
While the Quaternary Alluvium deposited in the Medoc there sometimes forms terrace mounds, here it is expressed as alluvial fans or cônes (another notable example of this in the world of wine is the Rutherford bench). As David Schildknecht relates:
“The deep alluvial fan that is the basis for this site is only barely tilted, as it might be in St. Helena or Rutherford, St.-Estephe or Pomerol … and these comparisons will not seem inapt once you experience the quality of La Peira’s wines.”
Carte: Mourvèdre de Bois de Pauliau /Mourvèdre de Belle Fiolle (Bellefeuille)
