During the first months of the year, a walk through a vineyard is like visiting a cemetery. The vines look dead, standing like rows of headstones and it’s hard to believe they will resurrect to produce juicy grapes in half a years’ time.The vines are dormant and have been since their leaves fell after the first very cold spell, usually just after Christmas. It was then that the pruning began. The farmer must hand prune every vine and ideally this job must to be finished by the end of March, before the warming of Spring wakes them from their long winter slumber. Pruning is an important and skilled job as it will determine not only the shape of the vine but the amount of fruit the vine will yield.
This year Vin en Vacances is joined by Gregg Meesters who will be running tours and tastings in the Pézenas and Capestang areas. Here, in his first blog since joining our team he tells us how it all came about.
A New Year, a new chapter…That’s what 2017 represents to me. In 2015 I moved to the beautiful Occitanie with my wife and 2 girls, looking for a different lifestyle and new challenges. And boy did we find challenges. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the administrative challenges that come with moving from one country to another. I am here to talk about a much more interesting challenge… Wine of course!Although wine has always been a part of my life - I still remember my dad bringing up his “good” bottles of wine from the cellar and me peeling the labels off the bottles to put in my scrapbook but it wasn’t until we decided to move to the largest wine producing area of the world that I became a wine enthusiast.
Food & Wine are so intrinsically intertwined with life in France, that we thought we'd share some of our favourite places to grab a bite in and around Carcassonne. With many of our guests staying either in the Bastide or up in La Cité, we're often asked for restaurant recommendations, so we've decided to share some of our favourite culinary hotspots with you! Some will be fabulous tapas bars, or places to grab a quick bite, others will offer a more formal dining experience. So without further ado.... A TABLE!
Carlos and I were very excited to be running the first of the ‘out of Languedoc’ wine holidays from the range of Taste Tours that I created last year. This one was called Taste! Tuscany and was 7 days of exploring the vineyards, the wines, the olive oils and beautiful villages and towns of this area. I had put the tour on the web site last November and was absolutely delighted when 16 people booked and the mix was perfect; 8 from the USA and 8 from the UK.I had spent a week in Tuscany on a ‘field trip’ with my professor when I was studying for my WSET Diploma in 2005 and Carlos and I spent a week there in October 2015 getting our bearings and deciding on an itinerary. I had also studied the wines of the region quite seriously over the years so we were well prepared when we set off this September and drove from Languedoc in one of the Vin en Vacances little buses, we were to hire another one in Pisa.
Vin en Vacances team Member Kate Wardell writes about one of her experiences this year.Whilst I think it's fair to say that our own food & wine holidays are pretty spectacular, sometimes we have the chance to work with other travel organisations, and this year, Vin en Vacances teamed up with Intrepid Travel to offer their holidaymakers a day trip with a difference!What does 'Intrepid' mean to you? Fearless? Dynamic? Adventurous? - maybe all three – and we certainly had a fantastic mix of characters on the day tours around the Minervois, from a single lady from Scotland who had mountain biked across the Atlas Mountains, and had over 100 parachute jumps to her name, to couples who had travelled through South America and the Antarctic. Intrepid Travel brought this amazingly diverse collection of travellers together on the Canal du Midi, for a succession of trips featuring a rather more gentle paced immersion into life in Southern France!
It’s October 3rd and I’m sitting in my Languedoc garden soaking up the bright autumn sunshine. Did I say autumn? It feels more like summer. Although a few leaves are turning golden the bees are still buzzing the birds are singing like its springtime. The peace of my garden is only disturbed by a distant dog bark from across the village, probably from near the little castle or by the church. All that is missing is the gurgle of river water that is normally running swiftly just beyond the wall at the bottom of my garden next to where I am sitting. The river has been dry since sometime in July for we have had not a drop of rain since early June.
Matching food with wine is an art and a skill that anyone can learn and experiment successfully with once you know the basic rules. It’s true that there are some classic food & wine marriages such as smoked salmon & champagne, Port & Stilton, Foie Gras & Sauternes and although they are magical matches there is nothing mystical going on, it’s all about balancing the flavours.Let’s take smoked salmon and Champagne or indeed smoked salmon and Chablis, both wines are a fabulous match. 
Smoked salmon is characterful in flavour without having flavours that are big and bold plus it is greasy. What you need is a wine that is also characterful with flavours that do not overwhelm the delicate taste of the salmon. It should also have refreshing acidity to cut though the greasiness and refresh your plate leaving it clean but still holding the delicious flavours of the food and wine. The last thing you want is a wine with obvious oak, it will leave a feeling of sliminess in the mouth! So Champagne and Chablis fulfil the role perfectly but so would other wines that fit their profile.Port & Stilton work for a few reasons. Port is a sweet wine and Stilton is a blue cheese that has a salty character. I have found that many people think that any red wine will be good with Stilton and other blue cheeses but in fact if they were to analyse the conjoined flavours of the blue veins and the salt with the tannins of a red wine they will realise that it leaves quite a bad flavour in the mouth. What you need is sugar to counterbalance it all and Port provides that perfectly as does Sauternes with Roquefort, another classic pairing.
Foie Gras & Sauternes works because sweet wines are the perfect foil for savoury and salty food as in the above example. That’s why I am not an advocate of dubbing sweet wines dessert or pudding wines, in my opinion they work equally well if not better with cheese and savoury foods so why categorize them for only one use?The impact of food on wine is mostly determined by the balance of primary tastes in the food of which there are five basic tastes; sour, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness and in recent years the 5th one has been added to the list which is a borrowed Japanese word umami, meaning delicious. It’s primarily a natural savoury or ripe flavour that the taste receptors in our mouths can’t get enough of. Think gravy, tomato ketchup, caramelised tomatoes, roasted meats and vegetables and for some marmite. Glutamate is one of the key compounds providing umami taste and widely present in savoury and fermented foods and commonly added to some. Glutamate is an amino acid and it’s this that is released when you slow cook something savoury such as meat or even soup that gives the irresistible umami flavours.
Pinot Gris is possibly the most famous of the gris grapes, a French grape but made world famous by the Italians who have re-christened it Pinot Grigio. I have to be honest I am not a great fan of the stuff that comes out the Vento region of Italy that’s grown and made with no regard other than quantity, has little flavour other than lemon juice and acid and is sold in huge quantities in the pubs around the UK. I call it ‘Château Cardboard’ as for me that is what it tastes of. But give me a glass from Friuli in the very north of that same country where the climate and care of production produces zesty floral wine with a hint of mineral and I will love you for ever.In fact I’m a big fan of all the gris grapes and often plump for a white wine from a gris grape rather than a blanc if there’s one on offer but I must admit that until I came to Languedoc I hadn’t given them much thought. I was of course conscious of Pinot Gris as the craze for it had begun in the early 2000’s but had not realised that gris grapes occur in many varieties.
For me one of the most beautiful areas close to Carcassonne is the Corbières. It’s a region of many differing landscapes from rolling hills in wide open countryside to deep river gorges and craggy cliffs. There are areas of forest and towards the Pyrenees some impressive mountains and close by the land stretches to touch the Mediterranean Sea. The Corbières is large and the terroirs it contain are so diverse that the wines are considerably different from one end of the region to the other.Terroir is a beautifully evocative French word used to describe the place where wine is grown and the influence it has on the wines style. The two most important elements of terroir are soil and climate, they are the most influential factors however there are many others such as the shape of the land and if rainfall easy escapes or if the earth traps it and other aspects such as what else is growing naturally in the area. Across Languedoc and spread across the Corbières hills is a low scrubland called garrigue. It enjoys limestone soils and is made up of a dense thicket of aromatic, lime tolerant shrubs including holm oaks, juniper, broom, fennel and cistus intermingled with lavender, rosemary, thyme and sage. The wines grown in the region often have a herby character due to the close proximity of the vineyards and the garrigue.
Carcassonne is actually 2 towns. I remember when I first arrived in the region and a friend suggested we meet for a coffee in the main square in Carcassonne. So I headed for the medieval town perched on the hill and walked into what seemed like the main square which is lined with restaurants and cafes. I chose a pretty spot to sit and order my coffee and waited for my friend to arrive. After 10 minutes she called me and asked where I was? I gave her the name of the cafe and she said there is no such cafe in the main square in Carcassonne, was I sure I was in place Carnot? Sure enough I was in the wrong place. I was in La Cité and she was in the bastide town below which all
locals call Carcassonne. 
So to get your bearings; La Cité is the walled medieval fortified town that sits majestically on the hill on the banks of the Aude river. Directly below is the bas town, a cluster of houses, little chapels, cafes and restaurants that ooze towards Le Pont Vieux, the 12th century bridge that crosses the river Aude and takes you into Bastide Saint-Louis. This so called modern town was built during the reign of King Louis the sun King and was built as all bastide towns were, in a grid system and at the heart of it is place Carnot, the main square.So what's to see in these 3 distinctly different parts of Carcassonne, well let's start with La Cité and work our way down the hill.