Malcolm Jolley: Searching for the best deal on French wines? Look to Roussillon and the Côtes Catalanes this summer

We don’t have a house wine, chez nous, but we often have a wine or two of the month. It’ll be something good at a good price that I buy a bunch of while it lasts. The really good deals tend to come and go, and they tend to change up.

My provincial liquor retail monopoly outlet is a big enough store that it has a large “Vintages” section. The stock in this section changes over by design. Wines in it arrive in limited quantities either because the producer will only allocate so many cases to the Ontario market, or because the wine is being tried out in our market with hopes that it will do well and be reordered in a larger quantity in the future.

It’s usually the latter category that becomes a wine of the month since they tend to be priced aggressively for an exceptionally high quality-to-price ratio. Sadly, if and when the wines return a year later in the next vintage, they’re often more expensive, or sometimes less good, since production has increased to meet greater demand.

It’s not just the labels of the wines of the month that change, it’s also the regions. Regions will come in and out of fashion, albeit slowly in an industry that measures production in years. The South of France has always been one of my favourite sources of great quality wine at a pleasing price, but the best deals seem to be increasingly found moving west from Provence and the Côtes du Rhône to Languedoc and now Roussillon.

Roussillon is where the Mediterranean coast of France turns left and goes from facing south to east. To the north are the Corbière Mountains which form the frontier with Languedoc. To the south and west the Pyrenees and the border with Spain. The department is made up of three river valleys: the Agly to the north, the Tech to the south, and the Têt, which runs through the capital of Perpignan, from which the Aragon Kings of Majorca once ruled from a fantastically crenelated castle.

Roussillon is sometimes called North Catalonia, and it is linked with Catalonian Spain across the mountains through common language and culture. I visited Roussillon, staying in Perpignan, tasting wines, and visiting vineyards and wineries across the land as a guest of the Consul Interprofessionnel des Vins du Roussillon in May of this year. Of the half dozen or so producers I remembered to ask (in French), all of them told me at home they spoke Catalan.

In the wine world, Roussillon is (or was) most famous for its fortified sweet wines called (somewhat confusingly) Vins Doux Naturels. While these remain important products, especially domestically, the region is increasingly focused on high-quality dry wines: red and rosé from Carignan, Grenache, and the usual Southern French suspects (more on these to come), and whites.^{1Note: most wines from Roussillon are either classified as Côtes du Roussillon AOP (or a variation thereof) or Côtes Catalanes IGP. The rules for making the latter a little bit looser, and the former includes wines that can name a particular village. There are also distinct AOPs like Coulliore. Generally speaking, the wines are made in similar ways from the same pool of grape varieties.} The white wines in Roussillon, often made with novel combinations of grapes, really made an impression on me, and one of them is my wine of this month.

Château Saint Roch is owned and operated by one of Roussillon’s better-known and larger producers, La Famille Lafage. The 2021 Saint Rock Corbarol is a crisp green apple white wine that mellows into blanched almonds on its long finish. It’s lovely and it’s presently $17.95 at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

The Corbarol is also a great example of my often repeated theory that some of the most interesting white wines that are both concentrated in fruit and naturally refreshing with acidity are now coming from warm climate regions. Roussillon has been under drought conditions for years.

At the beginning of May, the temperatures soared under cloudless skies, and producers complained that the winter of 2022-23 brought nearly no rain. And yet, like the Corbarol, the whites I tasted were almost all fresh, albeit in a mellow South of France way, without the clunkiness that can happen with acidulation.

The Corbarol is made with two grapes: 60 percent Grenache Blanc and 40 percent Roussanne. Roussanne gets around the South of France, from the feet of the Alps all the west and south to the Pyrenees. Grenache Blanc does too, at least from the Rhône, but the Roussillonais seem particularly adept at making wines from the white version of the Grenache grape.

Like Pinot Noir, Grenache and its good friend Carignan are not just “noir” or red wine grapes. Mutations of the grapes were long ago cultivated into white wine grapes in their own right: blanc (white) and gris (grey). Having originated just over the mountain in Spain, it would make sense for the vignerons of Roussanne would be particularly adept at making wine with these varieties.

The 2022 Henri Boudau Blanc is 80 percent Grenache Blanc with Macabeu, the principal grape of the Spanish sparkling wine Cava. The latter lifts it up into a particular citrussy freshness. It impressed enough to jot the name down on a paper menu at a seafood dinner on the coast, at Saint-Cyprien.

At the same dinner and tasting, Fabrice Rieu poured a number of interesting single-variety wines from the high-altitude vineyards of Maison Albera. There was a 100 percent Grenache Blanc and a 100 percent Roussanne, both fresh and full of minerals from vineyards over 500 metres above sea level. There was also a rare 100 percent Carignan Gris wine from the same high-altitude vineyard, lemony and weighty on the palate.

At another tasting, Monsieur Rieu poured a wine from Maison Albera called, Le Cépage Prohibé: The Prohibited Grape. The label did not say what the banned grape that made the 2022 wine was because as of that vintage, the Roussillonais and other French producers are no longer allowed to use the word Vermentino commercially.

The Sardinians managed to get the fix in at the EU, arguing that only they had the right to use what they deemed to be the Italian word Vermentino—the French would have to use Gallic word Rolle. The French are livid and refuse to abandon the word they have been using since as long as they can remember, preferring to say nothing about the grape that makes this citrussy wine perfumed with white flowers. But a Vermentino by any other name will still taste as fresh, fruity, and aromatic, so all’s well that ends well.