Back to Aniane

The view from the vineyards of Le Tourtou-- Domaine de la Grange des Peres

In Aniane, there aren’t a lot of people moving about the narrow cracked streets in late morning in winter. I ducked into a café off the central square before noon and found about a dozen locals—mostly men—sitting around drinking beer. A faintly recognizable odor—was that cigarette smoke?—seemed to permeate everything. Couldn’t be smoke, I thought, France banned smoking in public places including bars and restaurants from February 2007 and I haven't seen anyone light up indoors since.

I ordered a coffee and stood at the bar. My accent must have tipped the crowd that I wasn’t a government inspector. And they all suddenly fired up: ashtrays and cigarettes appearing out of nowhere.

Aniane as a center of Gallic resistance lives—sort of. It was here in 2001 where Robert Mondavi sought to buy public land but was thwarted by a tide of public opinion led by Aimé Guibert – maker of some France’s most expensive vin de pays at his Daumas Gassac. (In fact Guibert had wanted to sell his domaine to Robert Mondavi and started his war after Mondavi rejected Guibert’s upped-price). The public reaction to Mondavi was a cliché worthy of an Asterix comic book: Gaul beating back American capitalism and electing a communist mayor in the process.

But standing there in that café in Aniane, I wondered, what exactly had Aniane—its winegrowers, hunters and ecologists-- accomplished?

Aniane remains depressed. A few star winemakers who export their wines around the world, and there’s a local canning plant for olives and pickles, but for the most part the winegrowers of the Languedoc are drowning in too much mediocre wine. The Aniane cooperative closed in 2006 and merged with neighboring Gignac. Many continue to collect government subsidies to tear up their vineyards.

At the time of L’Affaire Mondavi (portrayed through the somewhat skewed lens of Jonathan Nossiter in his film Mondovino) it was predicted that the presence of multinational wine company would somehow cannibalize the little guys.

Some winemakers now are having second thoughts. In hindsight—the anti-Mondavi camp looks pretty dumb. Robert Mondavi (who died last year) was a foreigner with an international reputation interested in coming to town and growing wine on the rugged slopes above town for export to the world. Would that really have been a bad thing? Would not Mondavi’s presence have at least provided an engine of opportunity for local youth and another outlet for winegrowers to sell their grapes?

Got a light?

There is of course Aniane that works: Isabelle and Jean-Pierre Venture of Mas de la Seranne the neighbors of Gerard Depardieu’s vineyard (described in Corkscrewed), the young Frederic Pourtalié of Domaine de Montcalmès, Daumas Gassac, and Sylvain and Désirée Fadat of Domaine d’Aupilhac in nearby Montpeyroux.

When it comes to work, no one in Languedoc—or perhaps anywhere in the winemaking world—has impressed me more than Laurent Vaillé and his family at Domaine de La Grange des Peres. La Grange des Peres is a fairly rare and pretty expensive wine. I paid more than $100 for a bottle of its red 2005 in a Paris wine bar for a special occasion, but was so struck by it – the way it conjured the fullness of a southern wine with Burgundian length and elegance-- I knew I had to meet the man behind it.

Laurent doesn’t often receive visitors, doesn’t use e-mail or Facebook, is hard to get a hold of and comes off as soft spoken and shy. Now 46, Laurent trained as a physical therapist in the 1980s but soon returned home to Aniane to buy assemble about 15 low yielding hectares on the cooler facing northern slops of the mountaintop known as le Tourtou—neighboring Daumas Gassac and the land Mondavi hoped to buy. The first vintage of 1992 produced only 3,000 bottles.

Laurent and Alain Vaillé

As we tasted through the barrels in his cellar (Grange des Peres white is made from 70% Roussanne and the rest Marsanne and Chardonnay and the red is made from a blend of Syrah, Mourvèdre and Cabernet) Laurent calmly explained his beliefs.

He spends most of the time in the vines, and he and his brothers work traditionally—almost entirely organic. They regularly plough their rocky vineyards and use no herbicides. They fertilize with sheep droppings and grape Marc, and treat the vines with organic substances of sulfur and copper and herbal plant teas. They bottle their wine in accordance to the lunar calendar. But Laurent believes labels such as “organic” and “natural,” and “biodynamic” are nonsense-- marketing gimmicks to sell less than rigorously produced wine. The Vaillés have occasionally used pesticides against cicadelles (leafhoppers) who have spread a vine-killing disease known as Flavescence dorée through Southwest France, northern Italy and Spain. And Laurent remains convinced that Mondavi’s presence would have been good for the winegrowers of Aniane who are now near desperation.

La Grange des Peres is a wine in its own class—infinitely more interesting than Daumas Gassac where the winegrowing has been delegated to employees. I would go so far as to say that La Grange des Peres is the terroir wine Aimé Guibert pretends to make.

I took a drive with Laurent’s father, Alain, through the vineyards on Le Tourtou

And I was humbled. The earth of the vineyards can’t be called soil—it’s pure rock—chalk and limestone that had been dug into, dynamited and worked incessantly. The ground is white with broken stones. The vines were cut low in low goblet forms; the vineyards surrounded garrigue of wild thyme, rosemary, lavender and broom and views over the low-lying valley.

This is extreme terroir. To see the hard vastness of the place in the afternoon light is to explode a lot of romantic myths about winemaking harbored by us urbane folk. To work this hard and smile warmly at the end of a long day the as the Vaillé family does—is a gift that doesn’t come easily.