Issue 5: Tales from Faugères
...And environs. Something wild and magical always happens along the route from Béziers to Bédarieux. Stories from in and around the Languedoc’s most conspicuously great schist terroir.
Issue 5 of the Not Drinking Poison newsletter is here ! It’s about the Languedoc appellation of Faugères (and its immediate surroundings), which in the last two decades has become an important beachhead for natural winemaking and radical organic no-till viticulture. Both are exemplified by the appellation’s two iconic natural wine estates, Domaine Léon Barral and Clos Fantine.
If the precise geographical location of Faugères is not immediately clear to you, don’t worry. That’s normal. The Languedoc is vast. It’s why I sought to highlight just this one corner, all within forty minutes’ drive of the city of Béziers.
Heading north, you first pass through the industrial viticulture of the ancient marine clays of the pays d’Oc.
The landscape changes around Autignac. You enter the bulging schist hills of Faugères, a wonderfully sauvage landscape of old gobelet vines and dark, flaking rock faces. Fully 50% of the appellation is presently farmed organically, although natural vinification remains uncommon.
A short drive further north, through a mountain pass, brings you to the Orb river valley and the clay-limestone plateau beside the hardscrabble town of Bédarieux.
As in the rest of the long-downtrodden Languedoc, these sites don’t have much in the way of quality conventional wine culture. (Irrigation and harvesting machines abound.) But the area is home to more than its share of outsize natural wine personalities. For whatever reason, I tend to have strangely moving experiences whenever I visit them. Issue 5 contains many of these TALES FROM FAUGERES (and environs):
An account of watching Domaine Léon Barral’s DIDIER BARRAL lasso a WOUNDED BULL.
An account of the time my small dog performed a heroic act during TRANSHUMANCE (the passage of sheep from one pasture to another) at CLOS FANTINE.
A photo essay on HARVEST 2021 with CLOS FANTINE.
A visit to the high-altitude vineyard of Italian émigrée vigneronne SYBIL BALDASSARRE a.k.a. LA GRAINE SAUVAGE, who makes stratospheric FAUGERES BLANC.
A tour of the varisome Faugères vineyards of ALEXANDRE DURAND of PEIRA LEVADA, whose rustic, long-macerated reds plumb the MARBLE TERROIR east of Laurens.
An English translation of Puimuisson vigneron JEAN-FRANCOIS COUTELOU’s 2016 text “ODE TO BIODIVERSITY,” which he wrote when local idiots burned the nascent country hedges he’d planted around his vineyards. (No paywall.)
A visit to FREDERIC LAMBOEUF’s spacious Puissalicon natural wine canteen PICAMANDIL. (No paywall.)
An interview with veteran Bédarieux vigneron AXEL PRÜFER, in which he responds to inflammatory 2019 allegations (in the French magazine UFC-Que Choisir) that pesticides were detected in his 2017 grenache.
A visit to gem-stuffed Bédarieux cave-à-manger CHAI CHRISTINE CANNAC.
A festive harvest dinner with eccentric young Bédarieux transplants TOM GAUTIER and MIHA TRIFA of L’ABSURDE GENIE DES FLEURS.
Many thanks, as always, for reading. As Languedoc shepherds are wont to say, as they usher sheep through the garrigue to greener pastures: “Billie-billie-billie-billie!”