The family and I have just returned from our skiing trip to Les Angles in the southern Pyrenees. There was lots of snow and sunshine. It was our first ski trip to this particular resort and we found the slopes to be just right for us two long term scardey cat novice skiers and our ‘to the max 8 and a 11yr olds’. Fun was had by all, more for them than me as I managed to injure my foot, I don’t know how, maybe because of the new radical way I do parallel turns. My other disappointment was the total lack of Spanish wines in the village shops and restaurants, despite Spain being less than a short Swallow flight away ( sorry just watched lots of Monty Python while resting the injured foot ) I was really looking forward to exploring some obscure Catalan wines, but no, all wines available were distinctly French even though half the skiers were from over the border.
This got me thinking over every ‘too cool’ glass of red wine I was served in Les Angles, not to mention the biblical amounts of meat the restaurants dish out (don’t get me wrong – I’m no veggie but even lions would think twice about that much meat), that I had forgotten just how diverse French country wines can be. In one restaurant, much to my blushes, I did not know a single one of the wines on the list; I was aware of the AOC regions but not the individual wines themselves. There were lots of Rousillion grenache based wines along withMourvedre Mauzac and the better known Cabernets etc.
Now its been a long time since I studied this regions country wines, in fact more than 30, so my opinion was rather tarnished by the unpolished rustic wines that were being produced back then in the 80’s and the fact that I have been having a love affair with my two mistresses of Burgundy and Bordeaux. (The latter mistress and I are not getting on at the moment – more on that next time). So I have mostly overlooked trying out these obscure gems but much to my pleasure, I found all the wines I tried to be well crafted, polished yet still showing their rustic roots. A little expensive at restaurant prices (we paid just over 30 euros for most of them) I considered them to be about right if compared on taste to the more well known wines, but they need to bring the price down about 20% so more people from outside the region will give them a go.
As usual, on the last night of the ski trip there was a blizzard, leaving us with 40 cm of fresh snow, now a Ford S Max in the snow is not a good place to be – its big, heavy and has big summer tyres so it was a good thing we remembered to bring the snow chains. Due to the weather we took the southern route home A9, A61 , A62, so sadly no Andorra shopping and according to the kids a 7hr road to nowhere going the wrong way.
Along the route I was treated to a whos who of the south wests great wine names – you could spend a month discovering many of these vineyards on this route but here are just a few in the order I remember – Rivesaltes, Corbieres, Faugeres, Minervois, Limoux, Fronton, Gers, Cabardes, St Chinian then on to Armagnac and then, the pinnacle of red wine, Bordeaux; so a 7 hour road trip can be very interesting indeed, it just depends whose eyes you see it through, not sure the kids were as enthralled as I was.
By Chris Blakeman
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