Joint venture brings out best of Languedoc

Nov 20 2009 by Helen Savage, The Journal

EVERY now and then a wine appears that has a huge impact on how many other wines are made, marketed and appreciated.

Aimé Guibert’s Mas de Daumas Gassac is one of them. It was first released in 1980 and showed that great wine can be made in Languedoc.

At that time, as his son Samuel told me, with only a slight trace of exaggeration, “the Languedoc was the land of mass-produced juice. When my parents arrived in the Gassac Valley they had no idea of the quality of the land they’d bought”.

Fortunately they had knowledgeable friends, including Henri Enjalbert, the distinguished professor of geography at Bordeaux University. He told them that it reminded him of some of Burgundy’s finest sites and was “Grand Cru terroir.”

In other words, it had everything going for it to enable them to make really special wine. And they did. Helped by another distinguished Bordeaux academic, Emile Peynaud, who had trained some of the world’s most gifted winemakers, Mas de Daumas Gassac astonished everyone who tried it.

Like the greatest red wines of the Médoc, it’s a blend dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon. It was soon put up in blind tastings against the best of them and was not shown up.

Gault Millau called it ‘a Languedoc Château Lafite.’ Others likened it to Château Latour. It’s not really like either of them, not least because the rest of the blend is made up of an extraordinarily eclectic mix of around ten other French and Italian varieties.

I was privileged to try a cask sample of the 2008, which even at this relatively early stage in its development already displays a fabulous mix of ripe, spicy black fruit, with licorice and the herbs of the surrounding garrigue, and has a wonderfully silky texture. It will be very, very good.

There are now four other Mas de Daumas Gassac wines, including an intriguingly fine dry white – an even more bizarre blend, a kind of United Nations of white wine grapes in a bottle.

Although Mas de Daumas Gassac has inspired other Languedoc wine makers to craft wines of a quality undreamed of a generation ago, it remains something of a wine apart. That special terroir – the unique soils and unusually cool climate of the Gassac Valley means, as Samuel told me, that its production will always be fixed and limited.

The Guibert family could never make enough Mas de Daumas Gassac to meet the huge demand for it and so set about crafting a new range of wines, worthy of their name, but much more affordable.

And so, after the disappointment of an initial rebuff from his local co-operative winery in Aniane, in 1991 Aimé persuaded a group of vignerons in neighbouring villages to work with him.