In the Languedoc-Roussillon we live without compromise. Few regions harbour as much dynamism and creativity as this one. For around thirty years, new winegrowers have been coming to cultivate the vine on these stony soils, on unforgiving, sundrenched, windswept terroirs. Here, they silently write their own narrative; modern day tales of pruning hundred-year-old Carignan and pressing Grenache that have ripened under the Mediterranean sun.
“Be like Goethe – seek the Orient at your feet. The Orient of France is the Midi” said the Languedoc poet and writer Joseph Delteil, with true southern grandiloquence.
In his book “Paleolithic Cuisine” he immortalizes 14 recipes, including “Lucie’s tomatoes”: “Oh ripe tomatoes, you are the joy of the world and the sensual delight of the intestines”, plus black pudding, chicken with saffron rice, delicious milk cap mushrooms, his father’s personal recipe for Millas (a kind of maize cake), and other curiosities.
We winemakers of today understand Delteil and this natural approach to what we eat and drink, this primal cuisine that exists just as primal art exists. “Paleolithic cuisine is God’s cuisine”. Tuned in to the senses, poet and winemaker alike create by instinct, from within themselves, from memory, like early man, to reveal the essence of the fruits of the earth.
