Malepere is an appellation of red and rosé wines from an area immediately Southwest of Carcassonne in the Languedoc-Rousillon wine region of southern France. The appellation was created as VDQS Côtes de la Malepere in January 1983 and was promoted to FullAOC status in 2007, under the simpler name Malepere. As with the stylistically similar Cabardes appellation (directly to the North), Malepere wines are made from an eclectic combination of Bordeaux and Languedoc grapes. Merlot is the most widely used, combined with Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Grenache, Syrah and Cinsaut.
Malepere wines come from a Warm, DryMediterraneanClimate with a relatively mild winter. They are grown on clay and limestone Rich soils - similar to those of Blanquette de Limoux, located directly south. The environment here is not typical of the Languedoc (it is more like that of south-west France), as it is divided from the rest of the region by the hills of the CentralAude administrative area. This short chain of Pyrenean foothills reaches a height of 600 metres immediately east of Carcassonne, which creates a slightly different climate.
The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...
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 ...
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 ...
