Vin de Pays des Coteaux de Fenouillèdes

Vin de Pays des Coteaux de Fenouillèdes is the first area you encounter in the extreme west of the Roussillon’s wine-growing areas if you are coming southwards from the Languedoc to the Spanish border and in the upper Agly Valley. Its Vin de Pays status was annulled in 2003 leaving its ‘exceptionally concentrated dry reds…without a name to call its own,’ in the words of Jancis Robinson MW of the Financial Times.’ Source: ‘In the Press’ Harpers Wine & Spirit Weekly 20 June 2003, p.15.

Here is my take on this in my Green Space column for Harpers Wine & Spirit Weekly 20 November 2003:

I wouldn’t normally trouble you over Roussillon’s most obscure Vin de Pays. But in 2002 France’s wine apparatchiks abolished ‘Coteaux des Fenouillèdes’ because few private growers and no cooperatives were using it. Departmental Vin de Pays like Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales, or vin de pays for named after the Fenouillèdes two main ethnic groups, Côtes Catalanes for growers and d’Oc for Occitan growers, must be used instead. Some locals like Jean-Pierre Alary of Domaine du Grand Orient and Jean-Philippe Salvat are leading appeals to keep the Coteaux des Fenouillèdes denomination. And since 2000 the region has attracted a number of potentially headline-making new projects: St Emilion’s Jean-Luc Thunevin with local grower Jean-Roger Calvet (Calvet-Thunevin), Stéfan d’Arfeuille of Pomerol’s Château la Pointe (La Feuillade), Champagne F Bonville/Château Marac in Entre Deux Mers (Mas Karolina), Plumpton wine school graduates Mark Hoddy and Richard Case (La Pertuisane), ex-Spice Router Tom Lubbe and Marks & Spencer Wine Technologist Sam Harrop MW (Matassa), Loire-emigré Olivier Pithon, and a partnership between local growers Eric Laguerre of Domaine des Cistes and Gérard Gauby with Richards Walford (Le Soula).

All believe planted vineyards here offer unbeatable value compared to France’s classic areas. Small hillside parcels of old vines are available cheaply from older vignerons dying off along with the coops they supply.

Well, what would you rather have this Christmas: a wide-screen TV plus remote or a remote 50 ares of Grenache planted on pure granite, Pyrénean foothills by a Great War veteran whose war experience probably then shaped his vinous life’s work? For having survived the Western Front his viticultural survival would have meant inter-planting Grenache Blanc and Grenache Gris with Grenache Noir; to hedge bets in wetter years like 2002 (good for Blanc and Gris) and extremely hot ones like 2003 (good for Noir).

Those ossified coopérateurs unable to find buyers for their vines can receive a few hundred pounds per hectare under the EU’s vine-pull scheme. It seems absurd the grubbing of plots like these containing ultra-low yield vines with unique bud-wood (no two vines the same) is encouraged by EU hand-outs while elsewhere EU money finances replanting with high-yield, identikit clones.

And as net contributors to the EU, UK wine drinkers like you and me are helping to finance this absurdity. But preserving the Coteaux des Fenouillèdes name and its oldest vines passes an environmental as well as economic message. Coteaux des Fenouillèdes means “fennel hills” as wild fennel (fenouil de champs) grows abundantly here in the upper Agly river valley in northwest Roussillon. And Michel Barbaud, a 58-year-old Roussillon-resident with Loire origins, uses this local fennel to repel vine pests.

For 20 years Barbaud has formulated remedial teas from 20 plants: aromatic herbs like sage, rosemary, thyme and lavender, and plants also used specifically by accredited biodynamic growers like oak bark, nettle, valerian, dandelion, yarrow, camomile and horsetail.

Sprays made from crushed fennel macerated in olive oil and then diluted in water stink of aniseed but have proved very effective at discouraging grape worm chez Gauby, Pithon, Laguerre, Domaine Matassa, Calvet-Thunevin, and Le Soula.

The proscribed organic/biodynamic treatment for grape worm is the Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT) bacterium.

I don’t mind placing chickens in organic vineyards to control leafhoppers; but releasing single strains of bacteria into vineyards for their toxic effect on grape worm is a form of biotechnology organic and biodynamic growers could reasonably forgo.

Especially since genetically engineered BT has been developed on the back of the “organically acceptable” one.

Organic/biodynamic growers could never use a GM-version of BT.

But by using BT in the first place organic/biodynamic growers create demand for this type of product; and allow the GM-industry to argue however speciously that what’s good for the organic goose is good for the GM gander, too.

Reassuringly Barbaud wants the plants he uses to be left to grow naturally in and around vineyards providing habitat, and reducing water loss and soil erosion.

If more herbal and plant remedies like wild fennel become widespread outside France the Vin de Pays apparatchiks should auction Roussillon’s potentially unique but now superfluous fennel/Fennouillède name to foreign bidders.

France’s Australian or Californian competitors would pay handsomely for global rights to the ‘Fennel Gully’ or ‘Fennel Trail’ brands. So instead of using our EU contributions to subsidise the piecemeal grubbing up of priceless vines France could use dollars earned from obliterating the nomenclature describing her vinous heritage instead. And I would never trouble you about an undervalued but not value-less Vin de Pays, again. [ends]

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