My Life in Wine - Part 10

From Bordeaux to the Midi

Although I did the Bordeaux Run for many years, the van, or vans – I wore out two – now had to take me further, to many more places. The first Sunday Times Wine Club Members seemed more demanding than our gentle, contented Bordeaux Direct customers who were generally so contented, charming and easy to talk to. BD always supplied a large number of vicars. What does that say about us? (However, whenever we surveyed customers and asked what they did for a living, the biggest group by far, was always doctors. Which is interesting isn't it? Considering how today's doctors are always banging on about how we shouldn't really drink at all. So doctors have changed maybe? We must do another survey sometime). 

Anyway, a much greater range of wine was demanded by the new 'Clubbers'. So off I went … different parts of France to start with. (Which is the ground already covered in what became my first – and so far only –  book, 'Laithwaite's Great Wine Trek' – a collection of letters from various parts of France that I wrote to customers over a number of years).

Some regions produced more 'winners' than others. But I tried them all. I like to brag that I 'bagged' every wine region in France. If you look at the map of France in 'The World Atlas of Wine' (page 47 in the current edition)  you will get an idea of  how many there are. And there are actually more than shown. I've 'done' everything within the five corners of French 'Hexagone', from the French Moselle in the far north , round past Toul – (near Nancy), Allobroglie in the Alps, Bellet above Nice, Banyuls on the Spanish Border, Irouleguy in Basque Country, to the Fiefs Vendeens on the Atlantic Coast. ...and everything in between. 

Been there, bought the wines. Smug.

But I have to admit this turned out not to be a commercial thing. Customers are mostly quite conservative. In the day, all they ever asked for was Beaujolais. Which I would never sell, being a perverse sort of person. (I did sell 'Villages' Beaujolais which were and are much nicer and more genuine) So I didn't give the customers what they wanted – as they say you have to – so I didn't make any money. But as I said before, I thought making money in the wine business was impossible anyway. The Enjoyment of the  Hunt was my 'payment'.  And I particularly loved hunting down rare and tiny wine regions. The 'Great Little Wine Regions of France' (actually the title of a book by a sweet, elderly American called Basil Woon – from Colorado – who called in at the Windsor Arch one day) were so incredibly welcoming; they'd never seen a wine merchant before. And their wines were often quite amazing. Just only known to the locals. Unfortunately my customers were just not very interested. Barbara was quietly resigned to this profitless obsession … for the moment.

On the other hand, the biggest and most successful French region for me was the Midi, the regions of the  Languedoc  and Roussillon. It still is, and to this day provides us with more wine than most wine countries. Not an area I'd ever heard of, it was my Bordeaux suppliers who told me to go there. I clearly remember old man Bourlon, exasperated, crying; "Tonee! Arretez! Stop asking always for cheaper wine. Any Bordeaux wine cheaper than ours will only be cheaper because it has something wrong with it. If you must have cheaper wine, go to the Midi, and go see Dubernet."

I was always asking for cheaper, because I was always finding my Bordeaux wines were a bit dearer than many established competitors. But many of these cheap Bordeaux, I did eventually understand, came from suppliers that were very different to the people I bought from. Massive  merchant factories (with no vineyards) blending stuff day and night, from far and wide in huge volumes and immediately shovelling out truck after truck of wine that didn't taste like I wanted it … didn’t taste like real Bordeaux. I wanted to stick with my kind of dedicated, obsessed, passionate winegrowers. I insisted on only grower bottled wines. Not only were the wines nicer, these were wines made with loving care, things generally, were more exciting with these people.

So I set off for the Midi on a route that became very familiar; up the Dorgogne, past Cahors to Gaillac (good for a basic white wine) through Albi and over the Montagne Noir where suddenly the countryside goes from green fields and cows to dry scrubby bushes and pointy cypress trees … and then on through the endless Mediterranean vineyards to old Narbonne where Dubernet had his wine practice.

Dubernet was a good choice, a great man was Jean Dubernet. He was a top Bordeaux oenologist (a wine vet, if you like) trained by Peynaud. A rising star, he suddenly abandoned the comfy life of consulting to the great Bordeaux Chateaux and headed to the wild south, "to make a real difference".  He spoke quietly amongst the noisy, shouty, violent men of the Midi but nonetheless revolutionised winemaking in the region, which is - certainly was, then - the largest wine producing area in the world.

The very first vineyards in France were planted here, with vines probably brought by galley from the Middle East. The hillsides near the coast still have their terracing – mostly now abandoned – for vines. Vineyards always on the steep slopes where only vines survive, with the flatter more fertile land for food crops was the general rule. Those wines, one imagines, were really rather good.

Then some idiot imported a bunch of American vines which contained the little louse Phylloxera which destroyed almost every vineyard in Europe. This at a time when every working man in southern Europe was putting away litres of the stuff every meal. So suddenly … no wine! Winegrowers worked out that they could graft their vines on to louse resistant rootstock, but of course that took time and the population was going mental. Whoever could get back into production first would make a fortune.

There then occurred something like a liquid gold-rush. Ruined winegrowers from all over France figured out that they would be better off moving to the vast spaces of the Midi, where land was cheap and sunshine plentiful, and there planting something, anything, American hybrids, whatever, that produced loadsawine FAST! Never mind the quality. The desperate market would drink ANYTHING vaguely winelike. Vast fortunes were quickly made. The lower parts of the Midi countryside are still dotted with vast mansions and châteaux, built in the nineteenth century by the more successful new wine barons, oligarchs of their day, who got there first, planted all the land they could and really churned it out. It was vin ordinaire; those five star, metal capped, litre bottles which we Brits took to calling 'plonk'. It stained your teeth, 'le vin qui tache' … it stained your clothes! Dubernet called it Industrial Wine and hated it.

I'd assumed it would be something like plonk that I'd be getting from the Midi. At that time in Britain it had become quite cool to drink ordinaire. The big guys were importing wines in litres with plastic caps called Vieux Ceps, Carafino or Hirondelle.

But Dubernet had other ideas. He would take me on his rounds, in his trusty Citroen DS, drive me up into the hills to odd, small villages that looked ruined but still supported plenty of life. He picked four wines for me. Berlou;  a village high in the St Chinian hills which has strange purple 'soil', just flakes of prettily coloured mica, really. But vines do miracles in it. Not much else does. Anyway this schist stuff produced with little human help, a low acid, non-bitter, not tannic and therefore 'round' red wine. With no need for expensive barrel-ageing  it produced a what they call gouleyant , rich,  purple-ish wine. Customers adored it immediately.  It was cheap, too.

Then there was Château de Luc in a village of the same name; a vast semi-ruin, that made a gentle, brownish wine, a bit oxidised from being made in gigantic old wooden cask … a thing the size of a house.

Then there was this shop in Fabrezan where the village pharmacist made a really juicy-fruit Maceration Carbonique red. None of these wines were made with anything special in the way of grapes. Not 'noble' grapes.  Cinsault, Carignan, maybe a bit of Grenache.  Replanting to produce better wines was way beyond people's means, back then. They had to do the best they could with whatever they had. And Dubernet was there to help.

The fourth wine was called Château de Durban. I didn't see a château though there was a ruin somewhere. The wine was from the co-op (which has since closed). Again it was a mac carb wine. I took the plunge (in those days I had no one around to tell me it was too risky) and bought 300 cases of each. They filled an artic. They filled the arch. There's this photo of me in there with cases towering around.

That was mostly these Midi wines. And they went down so well with the customers. They were at a good price and people just loved that easy style. You didn't have to cellar these wines. Splash them into a jug ...what they do in the Midi bars.

But the most significant thing with these wines was that they didn't sell them in bottles. I'd go so far as to say that back then, no-one in this whole vast region sold wine by the bottle. I find that hard to believe myself these days when everywhere you go there are estates with signs saying vente direct, degustation gratuit, and when wineries have shops that would look fine in Mayfair. No, back then it was purely bulk wine. Almost all this wine left the region in a rail tanker on trains which were maybe a mile long...a mile of wine. They went to Paris and the north. Got bottled there.

There was one local bottling centre, big old steam driven thing and that's where Dubernet got my wine taken and bottled … and then exported. No-one had ever done this before! (We are talking 1972.) Winegrowers selling wine in bottles was totally new. Therefore the deals available were wonderful.

But Jean warned me … it could be hit and miss. Next year maybe these wines wouldn't be so good … but others would.  There would always be something good in such a vast place. Trick was, to find it. So we drew this weird-shaped wine label and made a brand called L'Epervier or 'sparrow hawk'. You see these little birds hovering all over the region, looking for a juicy morsel. And that for me was what Monsieur Dubernet did, and also his partner in the practice, Old Monsieur Demolombe and his wild son, Jean – who became a very great friend. And Jean's assistant, and then successor Andrée Ferrandiz, who continued to find wines for me ' till she retired two years ago. She still phones occasionally to tip me off about some new wine she's heard about. Customers followed the weird-shaped label. The wines changed. Every year there would be a new name and village … and style. But all were produced to an impeccable standard. By passionate men.

I was lost in this vast region – that I came to love even more than Bordeaux – and I always would be … anybody would be. Even Hugh's Midi map had little detail. The region's wines just were not mapped. So I had to have these helpers, my hawks.

From this point on, the 'Bordeaux Direct' name became somewhat misleading. However it was many years before we plucked up the courage to change it.

I could, I suppose have bought Mid wines bottled in Bordeaux. Saved myself many long drives. But it would not have been the same.  Bordeaux merchants would tanker in a lot of Midi wines. Whether they sold them as Midi wines, however, was another matter. As the weaker Midi ordinaires were always 'improved' in the old days by rich red imports from Algeria, so the Bordeaux merchants knew that pale, poor vintage Bordeaux could be made more saleable by blending in a good rich Corbières … is what my disapproving Bordeaux winegrowing friends would tell me. The authorities knew this and did their best to control provenance, to make it impossible to move wine without permission. Every shipment, every truck, had to be accompanied by papers that detailed what went from where to where and on what day. There were road blocks and checks. And prison. 

But ways round could be found. I have no idea if it was true but they told me about 'the motorbike thing': Early morning, a full tanker would leave Beziers with correct, stamped and dated papers and be in Bordeaux around noon. Its papers would immediately be handed to a biker who would rush them back to Beziers, where a second tanker would set off with the same correct papers to arrive before midnight. Le voila. Within the specified 24 hours, a whole extra tanker of good, untraceable Midi wine with which to improve or stretch a less than wonderful Bordeaux.

It’s all changed now of course.