Region & History

Anyone walking through the market of Perpignan today hears Catalan more often than almost anywhere else in France. There's a reason for that. Until 1659, the city didn't belong to France but to the Crown of Aragón. Before that, it even briefly belonged to the independent Kingdom of Mallorca, which was ruled from here rather than from the island. It was only the Peace of the Pyrenees that drew the border along the mountains and turned the Catalan northern territory into French land—yet the language remained, still visible today on town signs and menus.

Five centuries before that border was drawn, the Templars had already founded their most important commandery in the Roussillon at Trouillas, a few kilometers southwest of Perpignan: Mas Deu, documented from 1136. Tradition holds that around 1285, the physician Arnaud de Villeneuve developed a technique there that still shapes the wine world today. It can't be proven. Yet the story is told in almost every guide to the region. He is said to have poured pure grape brandy into fermenting must until the yeasts died. Fermentation stopped abruptly, residual sugar was preserved, and alcohol content jumped sharply. This process is still called mutage today. Without this one trick, neither Banyuls nor Maury would exist.

It wasn't in Bordeaux or Burgundy that the next decision of France's new appellation system fell in 1936, but here. Banyuls received its Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée on August 6, 1936. Maury followed that same summer. Both came months after the country's first six AOCs, such as Châteauneuf-du-Pape—but well ahead of Bordeaux in November and the first Burgundian crus the following winter. The reason was practical: sweet, fortified wines from the Roussillon filled aperitif glasses from Paris to Lyon at the time, and without protection of origin, cheap imitations from elsewhere in the country threatened to flood the market. That held for nearly seventy years. Then tastes shifted. From the 1980s onward, hardly anyone wanted to drink sweet aperitifs anymore, production collapsed, and entire villages in the Fenouillèdes suddenly found themselves living off a product no one wanted to buy.

The answer from a new generation of winemakers wasn't sweet, but dry. Starting in the 1990s, estates in the mountain villages of the Fenouillèdes began harvesting their old Grenache and Carignan vines no longer for VDN, but for robust, dry red wines under their own names. Latour-de-France, Caramany, and Lesquerde are even allowed to put their names on the label, as designated named crus within the Côtes du Roussillon Villages. Today the same old vines, many over fifty years old, stand once again for quality rather than quantity. A legacy, reinterpreted twice over.