Clairette du Languedoc-Roussillon/languedoc">Languedoc is an appellation from the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France. It covers white wines produced exclusively from the Clairette grape. Stylistically, the wines produced under the appellation show remarkable variation, making it difficult to describe the overall style. They range from light, fresh and lively to Soft, Rich, reddish-brown Rancio.
Those labelled "rancio" are aged for three years before being released to the market. In recent years, the production of Sweet wines has exceeded that of Dry wines. The vineyards growing the grapes for this appellation cover just under 100 hectares (250 acres). These are unevenly distributed among the 11 parishes that are authorized to produce these wines.
The Roussillon is home to a range of wine styles, at varying price points. Sweet fortified wines (vin doux naturel) used to dominate production, with still dry wines (vin sec) in the minority. In the last 30 years, however, this has completely changed, and vin sec now makes up the majority (80%) of the Roussillon’s output. The recent Wines of Roussillon tasting, held in London, not only highlighted many good quality dry wines being produced, but also cemented the idea that Roussillon whites are ...
Many wine styles can seem perplexing at first: imagine the first bottle of Barolo if you only know Barossa Shiraz, or the first bottle of Jura Savagnin if you were brought up on California Chardonnay. With time, thought and repeated tasting, though, comes understanding. You learn each wine’s syntax and lexicon, its hints and inferences. You grasp the ways in which each style communicates. Its beauty dawns, then grows. Rosé wine sales grew 23% worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Its fuel has come fr ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
