Barriques oubliées

Exploring the lost fortified wines of the Roussillon

A publisher once asked me what book I’d like to write next and after a moment’s reflection said something on lost fortified wines like Marsala, Australian tawnies and Banyuls. I’d call it barriques oubliées - forgotten barrels. She literally laughed in my face and said that she couldn’t think of anything less commercial.

Nevertheless, it’s one I think about a lot. I’d start the research in the Roussillon, home to Banyuls, Rivesaltes and Maury. Driving around this part of France, you might be forgiven for thinking you were in the Douro valley. There are the same precipitous terraces of vines cut into steep hills. The soil is schist too and the resulting wine, sweet, fortified and (usually) red, bears more than a passing resemblance to port.

Cave Terre du Templiers in Banyuls (Tourism-Mediterranean Pyrenees)

According to Wine, Moon and Stars, a memoir/ manifesto by rugby international turned Mr Languedoc Gerard Bertrand, much of this fortified wine went in the aperitif Byrrh, which in the 1960s was France’s bestselling aperitif. Rather as the vineyards planted with piquepoul and clairette around Marseillan went into Noilly Prat. Whether in the form of Byrrh or bottled as Banyuls etc, these fortified wines had their heyday between the 1920s and the 1960s. French people of a certain age still love a sweet drink before a meal such as sauternes, pinot des charentes or a ruby port.

The fortified wines of the Roussillon come in a bewildering array of styles based around grenache noir, blanc and gris, macabeu, carignan and muscat. Like port they are made by halting the fermentation with grape spirit leaving a wine of about 16%. There are wines, especially from Maury, that are like vintage port though from my rather limited experience they don’t age as magnificently. Then there are simple fruity wines that are not dissimilar to muscat beaume de venise. The most interesting ones are a bit like a cross between tawny port and madeira. They can be red or white, or somewhere in-between, but it doesn’t really matter after they’re aged oxidatively for years until they develop a flavour known as ‘rancio’.

This word literally means rancid in Catalan¹. Mmmmm, rancid. In order to become rancio, you have to do the opposite of everything you’re supposed to do to make a fresh modern wine. Don’t keep it cool, don’t protect it from oxygen, and age it for a long time. Some wines are left in the sun in glass demijohns, others in barrels and not topped up. The result is a unique flavour of nuts, toffee and dried fruit produced by the interaction between the wine, the wood and the air. You find similar flavours in tawny port and very old brandy. Maurys and Banyuls with rancio character sometimes have the word on the label but not always. In Rivesaltes look for the word 'ambré' which means the wines have been oxidised like sherry.

Such wines take a long time to make but while they were maturing, their customers were dying out and not being replaced. Sales of Rivesaltes alone collapsed from 70 million bottles in the middle of the 20th century, to less than three million in 2023. So as in the bodegas of Jerez, there’s a lot of fortified wine sitting unloved in cellars and warehouses in the south of France. Some of it would be quite ordinary, the sort of thing you can pick up today in a French supermarket for five euros but there was also treasure if you knew where to look: barriques oubliees!