GERARD Gauby looks like a rugby player. Seeing him, you would guess he was a front rower - short, stocky and with hair so short not even the dirtiest of opponents could get a grip on it. Later he confirms my suspicion: he started his career as a flanker, but as gravity and the years caught up with him, he moved to the front row.
Rugby runs in his veins: in his day, his father turned out for the French national team, and he was also a member of the last Perpignan team to win the French championship - in 1955. But this morning he is in no mood to talk rugby; a week earlier the unsung Argentines embarrassed the World Cup hosts in their own backyard. He only rolls his eyes.
So we stick to the sphere in which Gerard has achieved greater fame than on the rugby pitch: wine. The 2007 vintage has just been harvested and we find ourselves in the slightly chaotic cellar of Domaine Gauby, with the aroma of fermentation in the air.
Gerard does not speak a word of English, but this morning he is interpreted for us by Brunhilde, a cellar hand clad in shorts and a worn rugby jersey. If wine is not in her blood, it is under the fingernails of her ravaged hands. Her admiration for the high priest of Roussillon wine is palpable: he pours and explains, she translates, and we swallow our way through an initiation into the top wines of an extraordinary wine region.
The Roussillon does not look like an ordinary wine region - nor is its primary association with ‘ordinary' wine. The soul of this south-eastern corner of France, the Midi, wedged between the Mediterranean and the foothills of the Pyrenees, is as much Spanish - or, more accurately, Catalan - as French.
The Midi is something of a sleepy French backwater. Its broken landscape is apparently parched - hills covered in rock, shrubbery and now and again a few melancholy cypress. To reach Domaine Gauby, near the hamlet of Calce, you need to traverse hill and dale from the town of Estagel. En route, seemingly half-forgotten patches of scruffy vineyard cling to a slope here, or huddle in a dale there. Instead of the fecund beauty of many wine regions, this area offers only the exposed vulnerability of the Mediterranean garrigue - the low shrubs of wild lavender, thyme and rosemary.
The Roussillon has traditionally been associated with fortified sweet wines: the mostly white Muscat de Rivesaltes and heavy red Banyuls, with grenache as foundation. The first is primarily made north of the valley of the River Agly, the latter around the coastal town of Banyuls, hard next to the Spanish border. They are called vins doux naturel, but that is a misnomer: these are not natural sweet wines, but wines in which the fermentation has been arrested with a dose of alcohol.
But it is not on these abused wines that Geard Gauby has built his fame. No, with most of his vineyards in the highlands south of the Agly, and further north in the Fenouilledes sub-region, he makes some of the finest dry white and red wines in the Roussillon - from ancient vineyards of carignan and syrah, mourverdre and grenache, maccabeu and grenache gris, the roots of which reach deep into the slate and schist for survival.
When Gerard took over the family vineyards in the 1980s, their grapes, like 75 per cent of the region's production, were sold to a local co-operative. But he decided to make his own wine. They started as powerful, heavy wines, but in the 1990s he was converted to biodynamic farming and more elegant wines with a lower alcohol content.
It is all about those vineyards: hundreds of hectares have been pulled up in these parts to drain a small part of the French wine lake. Now good vineyard is precious, but the same low yields that make top vineyards here so unprofitable also make them cheap. This is viticulture on the edge of viability, but Gerard's faith in the earth, in nature, is unshakeable.
His runs his winemaking on organic and biodynamic principles, but he snorts derisively when you mention these labels - and he does not use them to sell his wines: "Organic is not a religion; it is a philosophy," Brunhilde translates the bon mots of the wine guru of Calce. I think what he means is that organic winemaking is not something abstract in which you believe; it is simply a practical way of doing things. As if to confirm, he continues: "It is a lifestyle - for example, we only have organic food on our table. We do as our forbears did; my grandfather cut his hair based on the phases of the moon, but he did not call himself ‘biodynamic'."
The Gauby philosophy is made flesh when we taste his wines. He prefers being called a vigneron rather than a winemaker, because the former embraces winemaking in both its viticultural and vinicultural dimensions. "A good wine," he says, "is made in the vineyard, not in the cellar - the cellar is only there to preserve what was done in the vineyard. Winemaking is polyculture, a blend of different cultures."
This devotion to the vineyard reaches all the way to this cellar, dug from the legendary schist soil of the Roussillon. Gerard points to one ‘wall' - in reality a bare, grey rock face with a vertical grain (the product of geological forces that collided here to throw up the Pyrenees) - and crumbles the brittle rock between his fingers. This is the geology of the Muntada vineyard, from where his top cuvee originates. The vertical grain and brittle texture permit the roots of decades-old carignan to reach metres deep into the soil for sustenance. In doing so, it absorbs the mineral flavours of the rock - a feature that envelops the best red wines of this region in a smoky minerality.
Gauby is not set up for visitors and our tasting is an informal affair. His entry level wines, Les Calcinaires - the white a blend of chardonnay, muscat and maccabeu, the red of grenache, carignan and mourvedre - he pours from the bottle, but for the Vieilles Vignes and his top cuvees, the red Muntada and white La Coume Ginestre, he sallies over to the barrels and sucks out a sample through a well-used rubber pipe into a glass, which he then merrily divides among us. The Comte is still fermenting and full of CO²Ren, can you make this number 2 a subscript rather than superscript? I can't find a symbol to do it, and the red Vieilles Vignes has not yet been blended. One half of what will become the Vielle Vignes is a syrah/grenache blend, but it stays closed in the glass. "It is because the marin is blowing," says Gerard of the sea wind. "When that goes down and the tramontane gets up from the interior, this wine will open up and taste very different."
This sounds like an old wives' tale, but then the marin has had a reputation since Roman days as a troubled wind that unsettles man and beast. Who am I to dispute that it can affect the way a wine tastes? The remaining half of that wine would be a field blend of carignan en mourverdre, which includes a small patch of pre-phylloxera vineyard more than a century old.
One barrel destined for the Muntada 2006 consists of some 65 per cent carignan, with the balance comprised of a field blend of diverse varieties, all fermented together. It is an astonishing wine for something that is still in barrel: soft, complex, with ripe fruit, but without the hard tannins that can make such a young wine a challenging proposition.
Earlier, Gerard had said a winemaker should be gentle with his wines; this wine rewards his gentle hand with a genteelness of its own. "I avoid any new oak, because I resent red wine that tastes like coffee," he pontificated. It is a philosophy that has made Gerard the biggest star in the Roussillon, but his winery is no longer the only source of fine wine in this region. The next day we got no answer from Eric Monne at Clot de l'Oum. It was all down to a far too relaxed lunch at the only restaurant in Calce, which meant we reached Clot de l'Oum an hour late, by which time Eric was on the outskirts of Perpignan.
Fortunately we could recover our loss partly the same evening at Auberge du Cellier in Montner. For an inconsequential village in a poor region of France, this was an ostentatiously good eatery, with a wine list paying homage to the local product. Our wallets would not stretch as far as Gauby's Muntada, but Monne's Saint Bart Vieilles Vignes 2005 was a worthy companion to the fine cuisine of Pierre Louis Marin. The wine lacked the pedigree of Muntada, but it spoke of the same devotion to the true Roussillon: the slightest reductiveness with its hint of sulphur when the bottle had been newly opened, which softened into a delightful wine packed with fruit and minerals and smokiness, like leather. After two days in the south-eastern French heartland of the Midi, this taste was the emblem of the Roussillon we had encountered - a taste that speaks of sun, of harsh, broken earth, of fierce wind.