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We don’t have much room to store cases of wine, so rather than offering people the same old list of Syrahs, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios and the rest of the usual suspects we thought we’d make up a wine list of the strangest and most unusual wines we could find, sort of like a wine zoo for exotic animals.

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I’ve been wanting to carry a wine from Hecht & Bannier ever since I first met them over three years ago when I was opening Dirt Candy. At a big wine tasting my sommelier/wine consultant, Rachel Ponce, introduced me to the two Frenchmen who run Hecht & Bannier and it was love at first sight. Mostly because they looked a lot like this:

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And this is what they sold me: the Hecht & Bannier Cotes du Roussillon Villages.

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Hecht & Bannier are devoted to rehabilitating the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, that country’s biggest wine-producing area which had, over the years, become known for quantity, not quality. (This area is better known as Languedoc, but more properly people include the name Roussillon, its neighbor to the South.) Making wine since, basically, the dawn of time, Languedoc-Roussillon is in the south of France, right on the coast of the Mediterranean and the border of Spain, and it was best known for making pretty much all the cheap table wine on the planet. Things started changing for the better in the 80′s and Hecht & Bannier are testifying preachers for the new Languedoc-Roussillon region which has become known as the “most anarchic” and the “most confounding” wine-producing region in France. Or, to get purple about it, wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region are, “dense, exciting, increasingly supple ambassadors of some of France’s wildest countryside.”

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Languedoc-Roussillon on just another “anarchic” and “confounding”
Thursday afternoon.

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There’s some evidence that the Celts were making wine in Languedoc-Roussillon way back when, but some stuffy stuffypants historians say, “Hell no!” to that idea. However, even the most stuffed shirt historian agrees that the Romans were planting vineyards there by 125 BC. And not just planting a couple of vineyards, but producing so much wine that they were shipping thousands of amphorae of it to the legions in Aquitaine and also back to Rome itself. Things kept getting better and better for Languedoc-Roussillon but success comes with a price and as monks got in on the game in the Middle Ages, and then as railroads were built in the 19th Century, more and more of Languedoc-Roussillon was planted until it was producing 44% of France’s wine by the dawn of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, a lot of this wine sucked. Originally, the old school hardcore vineyards in Languedoc-Roussillon were in the hills and the soil there produced wine with great minerality but as Languedoc-Roussillon wine got more popular, easier-to-plant vineyards sprung up on the plains and they yielded thin, watery reds. To make things worse, this wine had to be blended with the more robust wine coming from colonial Algeria in order to be palatable, a situation that made French business interests even more reliant on an unsustainable colony. Fraud and adulteration were rampant, prices plummeted and less and less people wanted table wine as their tastes improved, leading to the region hitting the skids hard.

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But in the 80′s it started to make a comeback with some of the older hillside vineyards coming out of the grave swinging punches, producing wines that blend fruitiness with mineral flavors in a way that isn’t often seen in French reds. Rather than turning out highly structured, dignified wines, the region’s best vineyards were turning out wild, crazy reds that blended more esoteric grapes like Carignan, Grenache and Mourvèdre. They had a hotness and a spiciness that you’d expect from a Spanish red, and a fruitiness that was downright undignified. Adding to the weirdness of these wines, many of them were from very old hillside vineyards that often had 100 year-old vines growing as a matter of course. Hecht & Bannier started up in the early 2000′s with a mission to seek out the oldest, most obscure and most interesting wines coming out of the played-out, industrialized Languedoc-Roussillon region, and they’ve become heroes of the wine world, familiar with almost all of the producers in the region and offering very limited quantities of intense, fascinating wines that are snapped up by wineheads in the know.

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Where it comes from. Look at them hills!

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I don’t like to have blends on the wine list, but this one is too good to pass up. Hecht & Bannier’s Cotes du Roussillon Villages is a blend of, well, let them say what it’s made of: “The famous Grenache from Maury which natural hotheadedness is balanced by cooler Syrah and Carignan from Belesta and Caramany. The best Mourvèdre from Tautavel usually come to complete the blend with more relief.” The result is a kinetic red wine with blackberry fruit blended with the mineral taste of the black schist in which it’s grown, giving it an edge of ash and a bit of smokiness like you’d expect to find in a good Scotch. It’s old, it’s a study in contrasts, and it comes out of the bottle ready for a fight. It’s basically a wine that tastes like Robert Shaw in JAWS.

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Read more about this particular wine and where it’s grown.

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