The Rhône, the Loire and the South

The Rhône valley runs roughly 200 kilometres south from Lyon to Avignon, and splits cleanly into a northern and a southern half with a substantial gap of nothing much in between. Treating them as one region is a mapping convenience that misleads almost everybody.

Every red in the north is Syrah, and only Syrah. The vineyards are terraced onto granite slopes so steep that machinery is impossible and the terraces have to be rebuilt by hand after heavy rain. Production is tiny - the whole north makes less wine than a handful of large Bordeaux estates. The name worth knowing is Côte-Rôtie, the "roasted slope", because it is what Hawke’s Bay Syrah gets measured against. Not explored yet.

The signature here is black pepper. That’s the compound rotundone, and it’s far more pronounced in cool climate Syrah than in warm - which is why Northern Rhône and Hawke’s Bay Syrah smell like each other and neither smells much like Barossa Shiraz.

The south is Mediterranean, flat, hot and windy, and it blends. Grenache leads, supported by Syrah and Mourvèdre - the trio abbreviated everywhere as GSM. The most famous appellation, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, permits 13 varieties (18, counting colour variants), though most wines use far fewer.

Châteauneuf’s vineyards are covered in galets - large smooth stones deposited by an ancient glacier - which store the day’s heat and radiate it back overnight. It’s also the birthplace of the AOC system: Baron Le Roy drew up its rules in 1923, and they became the template France adopted nationally 12 years later.

The appellations below it offer much the same thing for less money, and Côtes du Rhône covers the everyday tier - reliably one of the best value red categories in France.

France’s longest river, with vines along 1,000 kilometres of it, so it has no single identity. Two parts of it matter most. Muscadet, at the Atlantic end, is bone dry and saline and aged on its lees - the classic oyster wine, and absurdly cheap for what it is. Sancerre, a long way inland, is the flinty benchmark for Sauvignon Blanc against which Marlborough is always measured. In between is Chenin Blanc in every register from bone dry to dessert, and Cabernet Franc. Not explored yet.

The Loire is also the spiritual home of the natural wine movement, for better and worse. It produces both the most exciting and the most faulty wine in France, sometimes from adjacent cellars.

The one French region that labels by grape, because it spent much of its modern history as part of Germany and kept German habits along with German varieties. Tall green bottles, Riesling and Gewürztraminer and Pinot Gris, and a dry sunny climate sheltered by the Vosges. The persistent problem is sweetness: Alsace doesn’t reliably say whether a wine is dry or off-dry, and the same producer’s Pinot Gris may be either from one year to the next.

Languedoc-Roussillon is the largest vineyard area in the world by planted hectares, and spent most of the twentieth century producing industrial quantities of poor wine for the French domestic market. Since the 1980s it has been reinventing itself, and it’s now where the country’s most interesting value is - old vine Carignan, Grenache and Syrah, at prices the quality hasn’t caught up with.

Provence is the one major region where rosé is the main product rather than a sideline - around nine bottles in ten - and the pale dry style it settled on has been copied everywhere. The colour is a decision, not a by-product. The grapes are mostly Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah, picked early to keep the acid and pressed almost straight away, so the juice sees a few hours of skin contact at most. Less contact means less colour, and also less fruit and less grip: the style is defined as much by what it leaves out as by what it keeps.

That colour then became a marketing signal, which is worth knowing when you buy one. Pale doesn’t mean dry and it doesn’t mean good - it means the fruit was pressed early, which nearly everyone now does because the market pays for it. Most of it is built to drink inside a year or two of the vintage. The exception is Bandol, where Mourvèdre makes rosé with the structure to age, and reds among the most serious in southern France, routinely overlooked because of the region’s pink reputation. Not explored yet.

The South West, inland from Bordeaux, is where the Bordeaux varieties come from and where they’re still made without the Bordeaux markup. Cahors makes dark, firm Malbec, which the Argentines took and made famous, and Madiran makes Tannat, possibly the most tannic wine on earth. Not explored yet.