The northern part of the Languedoc-Roussillon area in the deep south of France on the Mediterranean coast. It includes, from north to southwest, the three départements of Gard, Hérault and Aude. The much smaller Roussillon in the département of Pyrénées-Orientales connects to the west, and the wine-growing regions of Provence and Rhône to the east. The name derives from "langue d'oc", which means "language of the Oc" (oc = yes). This Occitan language was spoken south of the Loire in the Middle Ages; to the north, "langue d'oil" was spoken ("oil" developed into "oui"). The regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées were merged in 2016 to form the new political region of Occitanie. Long before the much more famous Champagne, a sparkling wine was produced here, today's Blanquette de Limoux. A special form of a high-alcohol, sweet vin de liqueur in the Languedoc is the Cartagène. Until the 1980s, the Languedoc had a reputation as a wine-growing region that mainly produced cheap mass wine. From the beginning of the 1990s, there were EU-sponsored grubbing-up programmes. This led to an extremely strong reduction of the vineyards in only 10 years.
Vineyards
The vineyards cover a total of over 200,000 hectares of vines. They extend over 200 kilometres along mostly near the coastline of the Mediterranean from Nimes with the appellation Costières de Nîmes, which belongs to the Rhône region in terms of wine law, in the east to Narbonne with Limoux and Corbières in the west. Most of it lies on low-lying alluvial soil, and this is also where most of the clearing took place. The vineyards in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the west, which are a few hundred metres high, lie on slopes of slate and limestone. As in the Roussillon area, the climate is Mediterranean with dry and hot summers. The division of the vineyards according to quality levels:
Grape varieties
The most important red wine varieties are Grenache Noir (Garnacha Tinta), Mourvèdre (Monastrell) and Syrah; secondary varieties are Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan Noir (Mazuelo), Cinsaut,...
