While New World wines are selling more than French in the UK, a 90-year-old French wine company is taking on the New World at its own game. Ben McFarland reports.
French wine is having a bit of a hard time at the moment. Exports are down and winemakers are howling and harrumphing into their vats. You can understand their frustration. For years French wine was unrivalled in its quality and diversity and no self-respecting wine drinker would look beyond L'Hexagon for a top tipple or two.
However, New World wines have caught French wine producers with their pantalons round their ankles in the last decade or so. In the race for the tastebuds of the modern wine drinker, New World wine's Ferrari has left France's Citroen 2CV at the lights. In the last 10 years France's share of the on-trade has dropped from over 50 per cent to 35 per cent. According to AC Nielsen, New World wines now exceed this figure.
The winemakers of Australia, South America and the US have embraced innovation and technology much more willingly than their Gallic counterparts. Finding a French wine drinker who admits this is as likely as bumping into Jacques Chirac at a Little Chef.
While history, tradition, the convoluted appellation controlée (AOC) system and sheer bloody mindedness have all restricted the development of French wine, there are some producers who have taken a leaf out of the New World book yet retained a quintessentially French character.
Mont Tauch, one of France's leading co-operatives (umbrella organisations for grape growers who have no means to make wine themselves) based in the Languedoc region of South West France, is a case in point. It's a producer with a distinctly different approach to French winemaking.
It may date back to 1913 but the co-operative is anything but old fashioned. During the last seven or eight years, it has grabbed local vignerons (winemakers) by the scruff of the neck and dragged them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
What differentiates Mont Tauch from other French co-operatives is that its 300 wine growers work under contract and are paid for the quality and not, as is more often the case, the quantity of the grapes they produce. This means that each wine grower is paid for good grapes and penalised for bad ones.
Katie Jones, the Leicestershire-born export manager at Mont Tauch, elaborates: "The contract system means that the professional wine growers are separated from the farmers who just grow grapes. The grower is rewarded for the quality of his or her wines and takes full responsibility for the product from start to finish.
"It also allows for full traceability from wine to vine and encourages growers to aim higher as a collective."
Although Mont Tauch is nestled in the far-flung Corbieres hills between Narbonne and Perpignan, it is for the Fitou style of wine, rather than Corbieres, that it has made its name.
Fitou is the oldest AOC in Languedoc, dating back to 1948. For years, it was the classic own label entry level wine, the original cheap and cheerful. Then, during the late 1980s, Fitou became the high flying wine of the Mediterranean before losing the limelight once again.
Still today bouts of guffawing disdain come to the fore when you mention Fitou wine to pompous glass-swirling and uninformed aficionados of the grape. But little do these dorks of the cork know that Fitou is, once again, on the up.
Much of this progress can be attributed to Mont Tauch and its canny and very un-French approach to marketing.
"We've adopted a more New World perspective and the wine growers don't mind taking themselves a little less seriously," adds Katie, who has been the bubbly driving force behind the Mont Tauch irreverent approach. "The people who live here are refreshingly un-snooty and very much people of the earth."
The need to change
Katie admits the French wine industry needs to loosen up a bit. "Because we're so far out on a limb here we need to shout louder and differentiate ourselves in what is an extremely fragmented marketplace," she says. "We're keen to demystify things and come across as a French wine producer that's more approachable."
And now for the first time in its history it has set its sights on the UK pub market. "Pierre, Paul and Jacques" (PPJ), the French version of Tom, Dick and Harry, is aimed squarely at the UK on-trade. It's a screw-topped, full-bodied and spicy wine with the kind of quirky artwork and approach more readily associated with New World wines and has already been picked up by Kent brewer Shepherd Neame.
"We wanted to create a branded Fitou exclusively for the on-trade," explains Katie. "We didn't want to just re-market a supermarket wine under a different label - it's a completely unique wine for the on-trade. With vineyards classified according to quality and style, we can offer something truly bespoke that is genuinely different and specifically designed for pubs."
A blend of carignan, grenache and syrah grapes come together to make Pierre, Paul and Jacques while its sister blend, a rosé called "Pierre, Paul and Jacqueline" is a sprightly and wonderfully fruity Corbieres rosé made from grenache, consault and syrah.
The brand's specialist importer Stevens Garnier is supporting the launch with a comprehensive package including t-shirts, aprons, table tents and free samples to help convert any doubting wine drinkers.
But with a price point of £14.99, isn't the screwcap a bit of a risk? "Definitely not," says Katie. "The trade wanted it and we'd been wanting to do it ourselves. For a long time. It may be considered very forward thinking for a French producer but, as you've probably realised, we're not a typical French wine producer."
Harvest home
Harvest time at the winemaker is wonderfully tense with vignerons queuing up in tractors and trailers, loaded down with their year's grapes, waiting nervously to see if they make the grade.
An esteemed tasting panel and a state-of-the-art laboratory is Mont Tauch's very own version of the "man from Del Monte". This combination of human and technological expertise epitomises Mont Tauch's innovative approach. It represents a unification of traditional winemaking methods with high-tech gadgetry.
Over the last decade, Mont Tauch has invested more than E22m (£15m) in renovating the winery facilities and the vineyards. Hundreds of steel tanks were installed in 2001. Dubbed Cape Canaveral by the locals and set against the arid backdrop of the undulating Languedoc landscape, they're certainly a striking sight.
In addition to this investment, Mont Tauch has cast its net further afield and welcomed new wine growers and their vineyards into the fold. What's not been so welcome, however, has been the often brutal re-evaluation of their wine growing practices. The last few years has witnessed a number of replanting initiatives taking place in the region.
"Telling someone they've been growing the wrong grapes on the wrong soil for the last 10 years is not always an easy thing to do," admits Katie. "But it's in both their and our interest to get the best grapes from the land."
Mont Tauch places the individual wine growers at the forefront of everything they do. For example, Les Douze, a robust and sweet premium wine with a hint of oak, has a label that carries the first name of all 12 wine growers whose grapes are used in the wine. Turn the bottle round and you'll find a back label adorned with a dozen of their smiling faces.
"The competition between the growers to get their names and faces on these bottles is really intense," says Katie. "It changes every year and it's the talk of all of the surrounding towns."
The UK accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of everything Mont Tauch prod