Roussillon is a great, still underrated wine region: terraced vineyards on schist between sea and mountains, historic fortified sweet wines, and a generation of winemakers producing remarkable bottles. The first vines are minutes from the villa.
Wine and vines are quite a story around here. And a family story too.
Vines have been grown in this region for some two thousand six hundred years. The official specification for the Côtes du Roussillon appellation credits the Phocaeans, founders of Marseille around 600 BC, with teaching the people here how to prune a vine and make wine. The Banyuls specification credits the Phoenicians instead, a century earlier, through the port of Collioure. Two official texts, two versions: we shall not settle it.
This was a time when wine and beer were safer to drink than water, which could always harbour something unpleasant. Wine was a matter of hygiene long before it was a pleasure.
The Templars, those warrior monks who met an end as brutal as the Cathars did, left their mark on the landscape. Their commandery at Mas Deu, recorded as early as 1136, carried out drainage works in the late twelfth century that rank among the most significant in Roussillon, alongside a deliberate policy of planting vines. They are also widely credited with the terraces of Banyuls, but here historians are more cautious: recent research shows those dry-stone walls spread mainly in the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the railway. The handsome legend and the actual labour do not always coincide.
The same goes for mutage, the technique of halting fermentation by adding spirit, also used in Port and Madeira. Local tradition credits Arnaud de Villeneuve, a physician at the court of Perpignan, in 1285. It is a fine story, but the treatise it rests on is now considered apocryphal, and the method most likely predates him by centuries. What is certain is that these sweet wines gained their particular tax status through the Arago law of 1872 and the Pams law of 1898, and that they are among the very first controlled appellations in France, in 1936. Mutage produces wines that keep for decades, sometimes far longer.
The nineteenth century also gave rise to wines fortified with plants. The most famous survivor is Byrrh, based on cinchona bark, created in Thuir in 1866 by the Violet brothers. The cellars can be visited, they hold the largest oak vat in the world at a million litres, and like Coca-Cola the house now offers its original recipe alongside the modernised one.
An advertisement for Byrrh, found in the family archives: "L. Violet, J. and S. Violet Frères successors, in Thuir". Warehouses at Port-Vendres, Tautavel and Cases-de-Pène, branches from Perpignan to London and Montreal. On the back: "Byrrh is made with old and generous wines, on a base of first quality quinine", drunk neat or topped up with chilled soda water. Someone has scribbled notes in the margin.
To measure what has changed: a French person drank one hundred and forty litres of wine a year in 1960. Today it is forty.
Now the family story. My great-grandfather had vines and sold his harvest once a year to the merchant. My grandfather was a civil servant, but he kept his patch, had the family pick it, and took it to the cooperative to be turned into rough red wine with a plastic cork. In exchange, every year he received marc spirit at 42% alcohol, under the home distiller's privilege and outside any commercial circuit. A few bottles remain in the family house, which nobody dares open. So do some dames-jeannes, those five and ten litre demijohns, and a few old barrels. My mother remembers being given hot sweetened red wine for a cold, at the age of five or six.
That era is over. Wine disappeared from school canteens at lunchtime, public health did its work, and growers had to reinvent themselves or vanish. Not all of them managed it. But we have moved from mass industrial farming, with its copper sulphate spraying, to distinctly better wines. The terroir still yields reds at fifteen or sixteen degrees, but they are lighter than they were, whites and rosés have taken their place, and the latest arrival is alcohol-free rosé. It may sound like a contradiction in terms, but these drinks are a fast-growing market, while wine keeps contracting.
That is why you regularly pass abandoned vines by the roadside. And looking at the ones still worked, the difficulty is easy to imagine: nothing can be mechanised on slopes of twenty or thirty degrees, where the harvest is carried on people's backs in full sun. Finding volunteers for that noble, thankless work gets harder every year. The department has lost five thousand hectares of vines in ten years.
The good news, for anyone who enjoys wine, is that a staggering number of estates and styles remain to be explored. And that growers are, as a rule, enthusiasts who love talking about what they do, provided you give them a little attention. Another piece of good news: nearly a third of the vineyard is now farmed organically, which puts Roussillon among the most committed regions in France.
The wandering can start at a wine shop, or with no plan at all. Around Laroque alone there are a good twenty estates open to visitors, and if you head towards Collioure and Banyuls, or up the Agly valley, there is no shortage of choice.
A last word on the fortified wines, banyuls, rivesaltes, maury. Wines have modernised, but this tradition deserves rediscovering. You are not obliged to drink them the way our grandparents did: try them very cold, over ice, in cocktails. And you should at least once see the glass demijohns sitting out in full sun, which is the official way these wines are aged in oxidative conditions. An explosion of aromas you will not find anywhere else.
Family paperwork
A few pieces out of the Prats family drawer in Laroque-des-Albères. The invoices are Philippe's great-grandfather's, who shared his first name, Pierre, with his son: the same name appears on these papers thirty years apart.
11 October 1913: a Marmonier number 3 wine press, a rocker pump, rubber hose and copper fittings, for 811 francs and 10 centimes. The cellar was being kitted out.12 January 1914: two hundred and ten kilos of grey oats, the sacks and the toll duty, for 51 francs 90. Besides the vines, there was an animal to feed.The product and the wages, side by side. The red is what the harvest became once taken to the cooperative. The marc, at 42% alcohol, is what Philippe's grandfather received every year under the home distiller's privilege, outside any commercial circuit.
Demijohns in the sun
For the rancios, the wine goes into dames-jeannes, those big 20 to 60 litre glass demijohns, left outside on cellar roofs or among the vines. Three years or more of full sun, cold nights and thermal shocks: oxidation runs away with it, the wine ages at high speed and develops aromas of walnut, dried fig and roasted fruit that you would not get any other way.
These ones are at Domaine Lafage, lined up on a low wall facing the sunset. It is one of the few places where you can still watch it happen in the open air, and it is worth the detour for the light coming through the glass at the end of the day alone.
The appellations around the villa
Collioure and Banyuls
The terraced vineyards of the Côte Vermeille, between sea and schist: powerful reds, characterful whites and the famous Banyuls fortified sweet wines.
Côtes du Roussillon and Les Aspres
The appellations of the plain and the foothills, minutes from the villa.
Rivesaltes and Maury
Roussillon's other great fortified sweet wines, best discovered at the winery.
How the fortified sweet wines are made
Mutage
Fermentation is stopped halfway through by adding alcohol. The grape sugar never gets converted, so it stays in the wine: that is what makes a vin doux naturel, and what sets it apart from a classic dessert wine. Everyone here talks about these wines without ever explaining how they are made.
Madeira's cousin
Same intuition as in Madeira, where people realised that wine shipped out to the Indies came back far better than it left, cooked for months in the hold under tropical heat. They called it vinho da roda, and by the end of the 18th century producers started heating the wine at home rather than sending it on the voyage. Here, the sun does the work instead of the ship.
Visiting and tasting
Cellars and estates
Most estates welcome visitors for tastings, often without appointment in summer.
The terraced vineyards of Banyuls
A landscape unique in France, also worth exploring on foot between the schist walls.
Our favorite addresses (non-exhaustive list)
La Tête dans le Cru (Laroque, 5 min)
The village wine shop, ZA du CD 618. The perfect starting point for a quick tour of local wines before visiting the estates.
Thirty hectares of organically farmed vines on the Albères foothills, in Côtes du Roussillon and Côtes Catalanes. The twelfth-century Templar castle stands on Roman ruins, surrounded by three-hundred-year-old trees, with Mount Canigou behind. Free tasting. It is one of the estates of the Jonquères d'Oriola house, below.
Jonquères d'Oriola, Château de Corneilla (Corneilla-del-Vercol)
The same family has been making wine here since 1485. Ninety-five hectares today, from Collioure to Muscat de Rivesaltes by way of Côtes du Roussillon, plus an organic grove of six thousand olive trees. Their history belongs as much to the horse as to the vine, to the point that one of their cuvées is called Cavalcade. The tasting room is at the castle, 3 rue du Château, open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to midday and 3pm to 6.30pm, with longer hours in July and August.
Les Salicaires, Vincent Lafage (Canet-en-Roussillon)
30 min
Vincent Lafage belongs to the family behind Domaine Lafage next door, one generation on from Jean-Marc who runs it, and he went off to make his own mark. He set up in 2016 on twenty hectares of family land, chemin du Mas Durand, a few kilometres from the sea. Organic growing, hand harvesting, and winemaking with nothing added: indigenous yeasts, no fining, no filtering, and part of the crop raised in terracotta amphorae. Around fifteen thousand bottles a year, in red, white and orange. His father Yves, whom I know, sums up the spirit of the place well: natural wine made by growers who know their craft, not because it happens to be fashionable. The estate has no website of its own, the link goes to the merchant who distributes it.
On the other side of the Albères, in Sant Climent Sescebes (Empordà): tours and tastings in a stunning contemporary winery, half-buried among the vines.
La Pression d'Archimède (Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines)
7 min
A genuine brewpub four kilometres away, set in the village's old distillery, where you drink at the foot of the tanks with local tapas and charcuterie. Eleven unfiltered, unpasteurised beers, including a blonde brewed with muscat and another with banyuls: the local sweet wines, in beer. Open Tuesday to Saturday, afternoons and evenings.
A fully organic brewery and distillery with a bar, a shop and sharing boards on site. They built the whole installation with their own hands out of reclaimed milk tanks, and even planted their own hop field before drought forced them to give it up. They also distil Seixanta 6, which they present as the first whisky of Catalan France.
This one cannot be visited, but it is in every supermarket and the story is worth telling. It comes from the Milles family, lemonade makers in Toulouges since 1928, who also produce the Limonette and the Sémillante spring water. The name refers to Toulouges, where the Pau i Treva de Deu, the Truce of God, was signed in 1027: hostilities had to cease from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning. Which means the weekend was invented twenty minutes from here.
The water you drink
The mineral spring of Laroque
On foot
Our own spring, a favourite walk for generations, with its picnic area and the cargolades of years past. It is sometimes called Font d'Aram, the copper fountain, after the colour of the surrounding rock, but that is a misnomer: the water is ferruginous, and the tourist board notes that its composition is strikingly close to the thermal waters of Le Boulou. No public analysis exists, so read the sign on site before drinking.
To drink local without alcohol, look for these two labels in the supermarket. Sémillante spring water is drawn from a hundred metres beneath Toulouges, and the Limonette, a sparkling lemon drink, has been dear to Catalan hearts since 1928. Both come from Milles, the same house as the Mil.lenari beer. One detail that matters: it is spring water, not mineral water. There is no longer any bottled mineral water in the department.
A bottle of naturally sparkling mineral water from Le Boulou, kept under a glass dome. Bottling stopped around the year 2000, and no mineral water is bottled in the département any more.South of the border, Vichy Catalan is still going. A sparkling water that comes out of the ground warm, heavily mineralised and notably salty, on every table in southern Catalonia.
Hot springs and bathing
The thermal baths of Le Boulou
15 min
Cold water, between 13 and 17 degrees, sodium bicarbonate rich, which is unique in the Pyrenees. The spa treats digestive and cardio-arterial conditions from March to November. The bottled Boulou water disappeared around the year 2000: the old bottling plant is now the spa's gym, in industrial loft style.
The opposite of Le Boulou: hyperthermal water, 44 to 62 degrees, sulphurous, so rich in sulphur that a thermal plankton develops in it and gives it a silky feel. No prescription needed to try it: a 49-euro taster gives you half a day and four treatments, once a year.
Three open-air pools between 34 and 37 degrees, high in the mountains at 1,156 metres, fed by a 58-degree spring cooled without ever being diluted. Nine euros, no booking, valid all day. A long drive, but in winter under snow it is quite something.
The most beautiful and the cheapest, at six euros. Two open-air granite pools at 38 degrees among the trees, with an immense panorama, plus two ancient tubs carved straight out of granite blocks. Set aside the whole day.
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