About Wine in the Languedoc

Meet Wendy Gedney, our wine guru   Wine teacher Wendy Gedney is Creme de Languedoc’s resident wine expert, having passionately penned much of the content in this ‘About Languedoc Wine’ section of the site. Wendy has an enormous love of wines of the Languedoc-Roussillon, and we’re absolutely thrilled that she has agreed to work with Creme-de-Languedoc.com to share so much of her knowledge and enthusiasm for Languedoc wines with our site’s visitors.   Wendy is a qualified wine teacher and holds some of the highest qualifications attainable in the world of wine, including the WSET Diploma and the highly regarded Languedoc-Roussillon Masters Certificate. Few know more about the wines of this exciting region than she does, and via her wine tours and bespoke tastings conducted by her company ‘’ she takes hundreds of visitors each year to hidden vineyards off the beaten track, to discover the passion and individuality that the region’s extraordinary wine makers put into their wines. You can find out more about Vin En Vacances’ wine tours in our Languedoc Wine Tours & Walks page, and their bespoke tastings in our Languedoc Wine Tasting page.

Is Languedoc wine worth delving in to? It wasn’t that long ago that the answer to that question would probably have been a ‘no’. Languedoc was, until recently, the world’s largest wine-producing region, but most of its wine was of pretty middling quality, cheerful ‘plonk’ produced for the mass market (or for vinegar), and certainly nothing that the French or anyone else took seriously.

Welcome to the ‘wild south’

How times have changed. Quantity has been sacrificed for quality in the last 10 years, with scores of adventurous wine makers buying up vineyards that once only produced wine for mass ‘co-ops’, and re-planting them with more interesting grape varieties, grown and blended in ever-more novel ways. Languedoc is no longer the world’s wine factory (Chile and other regions now produce more), and the quality of the wines produced here has soared through the roof. In fact, Languedoc is now thought to be one of the most interesting and dynamic wine regions in the world - with passionate wine makers from South Africa, Australia, the UK, the Americas and other parts of France, all converging on what is now the ‘wild south’ to make wines of great subtlety and complexity.

Before you head off...

In this section of the website, we introduce you to the basics of Languedoc wine. We take you through the history of wine here (from the first Roman vines to the phyloxeria epdemic and ensuing ‘wine-rush’), explain the differences between Languedoc’s very varied wine regions, we get to grips with Languedoc’s fascinating ‘terroir’ (the mysterious combination of soil, sun and aspect), guide you through the region’s growing list of grape varieties, we attempt to explain France’s head-dizzying certification system, and lastly give you our hot tips on tracking down and buying the best wines the region has to offer.

We hope that armed with some of the knowledge contained in these pages, your trips out wine tasting or exploring some off-the-beaten-track wine domain will be all the more interesting and rewarding.

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