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“Everything really desirable

has come about because of,

or in spite of, wine!”

– Lawrence Durrell, quoting his first landlord in Provence, late 1950s

We arrived in the south of France at the beginning of August after nine years of planning. We chose Narbonne, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, about 100 kilometres southwest of Montpellier, and very quickly the charms of the place became evident. Three hundred days of sun a year, fruit trees in the backyard, mountains to the north of us, the Mediterranean to the south. And the food – it doesn't take much of a palate to recognize its wonders: the cheeses, the terrines, the fresh produce, the buttery treats. But it's the wine, in its breadth and depth, its complexity, that can defeat the non-expert. You can drink it, but you cannot grasp it.

It has taken me three months to marshal my first thoughts on wine in France, and I have been doing my research. To say that the varieties, the appellations, the styles, the nomenclature, the legalities and the history of wine in France are overwhelming is to state the obvious. Here, in this little corner of the country, where the wine is undergoing a major renaissance, it boggles the mind.

Languedoc-Roussillon stretches from Toulouse to Avignon, and from the Spanish border to Àles in the north, above Nîmes. Just outside its farthest eastern boundary is Arles, where van Gogh painted his bedroom, and in the west, you are on the doorstep of Bordeaux. The region stretches from sea to mountain in less than 20 kilometres in many places, is fretted with rivers and lakes and also mixes some of the lushest countryside with some of the harshest. The terrain is mainly limestone and schist, the latter an inhospitable metamorphic rock layer in which the vast majority of this area's wine is planted and which somehow produces a startling array of grapes. The stony ground sucks up

whatever minuscule amount of rain falls and drives it straight into the water table, yet the hardy grapes grow fat and juicy, a miracle of botanical prioritizing.

Until about 30 years ago, if you were a wine drinker in Europe or Japan or North America and you bought a decent, inexpensive red table wine from France, there was about a 90-per-cent chance that its grapes came from within 100 kilometres of my front door. This area was known, and not kindly, as the “wine lake.” Grapes – good, bad and indifferent – were grown here for a communal, commercial purpose: to make a palatable, alcoholic, red drink. That legacy lives on.

One of the pioneers of Languedoc wine, Jean Clavel, who campaigned for 40 years to get various areas of the region officially recognized, has said of today's vintages: “Half of Languedoc's wine is unsellable.” Note he doesn't say “undrinkable,” just “unsellable.” This is the legacy of plonk. This is a well-known fact about Languedoc's wines.

But one of the last secrets in French wine is that some of the best of it (and some of the freshest experimentation) comes from this area. The kingly wines of Bordeaux, Champagne, Burgundy and Rhône can never be unseated, but here, where all hope was lost for a long time, great things are happening.

It's impossible to give an overview. But if you focus on one area, you can get a little sense of things. Twenty-five kilometres to the north of us is the AOC Saint-Chinian. AOC stands for “Appellation d'origine contrôllée,” and to keep things simple, this is a sort of stamp of approval for a certain area. What it really means, however, is that French wine, under the AOC system, is driven by land rather than brand. If you are a wine grower in the AOC Saint-Chinian, and you follow a basic set of rules in growing and winemaking, then you may use the Saint-Chinian name on your wine and it will go forth into the world under the AOC's rubric.

This is perhaps one of the greatest achievements in France's wine system: the terroir – the land itself – is the brand. There are no Mondavis here (although they have tried), no Wolf Blasses. There may well be Château Margaux, but there would have been no Margaux without the AOC Haut-Médoc (although there is now an AOC Margaux). French wine is sold by its own character, not by corporations. It makes a difference.

For one thing, it inspires fierce pride. It also inspires a certain degree of preciousness, an approach that has seen French wine lose its footing in world markets. The French are not fond of change, and the world of wine is changing. I was a typical wine consumer before I came to France, aware of brands, not necessarily grapes, and certainly not terroirs, French or otherwise.

One mistake French wine has made in the New World is that apart from Beaujolais, it doesn't make much of an effort to woo its potential customers. Hence, you need to be educated to drink French wine, and it is easy to enjoy wine without knowing much about it. So why dig deeper?

When you're in France, you understand immediately why the public-relations exercise in wine has failed: The French drink only their own wine and they would never consider drinking anyone else's. They can't imagine why you would, either. The French rule of thumb when it comes to grapes and meat and cheese and pastry is not “this is how things should or could be” but simply that “this is how things are.” This is an example of a subjectivity so extreme and so uniform that it appears to be objectivity: Your average Frenchman would react to the news that they're making wines as good as French wines in California and New Zealand as if you'd told him the sun revolves around the Earth.

Here, we are tourists among the vines, loyal to no zone. The locals think us crazy to go anywhere but down the street to buy the local stuff. Maybe not the grape juice that comes out of a hose stuck in the wall, but why spend more than three euros on something that came 50 kilometres away from here? Get the nice stuff that comes from La Clape! And there is so much Corbières around (you could squeeze a handful of wet dirt in your backyard and get a decent glass of red out of it) that you needn't think of drinking anything else! Here we drink the local stuff! Or at least we should. So my partner, Anne, and I decided to go to Saint-Chinian and see what the local fuss is about.

The town of Saint-Chinian is only 30 kilometres north of Narbonne. It takes half an hour to drive there on the smaller rural highways (nicer to see all the small towns on the way). The appellation to which the town lends its name is tiny, sitting both on the sides of the Black Mountains and within its lowland girdle.

The upper and lower reaches of the zone produce grapes with different characteristics. Throughout, the vines have their feet in schist, limestone and sandstone, and the predominant colour here is red. Once you ebb out of the top of the zone, to St. Pons, the vines peter out and you see more pasture. A few of the towns in the appellation that have producers of note are Cruzy, Roquebrun, Cessenon-Sur-Orb, Cébazan and Saint-Chinian

itself.

But yesterday, we decided to head, in particular, to Berlou, where a man named Jean-Marie Rimbert is part of a small cadre of wine sorcerers who are rescuing the reputation of a grape called carignan. The grape itself needn't be resuscitated: It is the most common grape grown in France. It has long been the main ingredient in plonk. It's hardy, and it has one of the largest yields per hectare – upwards of 25 tons. (Compare this with pinot noir, a much more difficult grape, for which a yield of four tons per hectare is considered brilliant.)

The idea of making a decent pure carignan is akin to making steak out of corn. You actually do get steak from corn, but not as efficiently as you might like. Rimbert is trying to get the meat directly out of the carignan and he is succeeding beyond most people's dreams. Consider this opinion on carignan from winepro.org: “Carignan mostly produces wines that have high colour, acidity and tannin, without displaying much distinct flavour or personality and with very little appeal.”

There are so many easier ways to make wine than to take a hated, but necessary, varietal and base your livelihood on it. But that is what Rimbert is doing in Saint-Chinian, and we wanted to meet him.

In the spirit of his oeuvre, we decide to take the hard way to Berlou. The N112 leads north out of Saint-Chinian to St. Pons, and halfway there, as the mountains close in on both sides, there is a tiny road that leads east, directly into the mountains. Calling it a road is a mere courtesy: It is a paved path. It is wide enough, just about, for a single car, and leads into the trees, up and up, before capriciously doglegging it down the mountainside (in order to become the main street of Poussillières, a hamlet of eight buildings) and back up again, providing access to various private hunting zones (quail and boar are plentiful here, as are cèpes, trompets de mortes and oyster mushrooms), and finally reaching Berlou, sitting deep in a trough between ranges. It is perhaps 12 kilometres from the N112 to Berlou; it takes us almost an hour to drive it.

We had called before and left a message, but had not heard back. Our drive to the winery is a perverse act of faith, and when we get there, Jean-Marie himself is in the house and, although it is the beginning of the busiest time of year for him, he takes an hour with us and shows us his operation. He's a big guy, in the Gérard Depardieu mould, with a wide chest, a broad boxer's face and permanently purpled fingernails. He shows us the maceration room, with giant steel vats holding crushed grapes, the cave, with perhaps two hundred barrels of the 2005 and 2006 vintages, and then there is the little garage where he keeps what remains of the 2005 and 2004s. He makes whites as well as reds, but we are not that interested in the whites (and in quiet cahoots with us, he doesn't bother to offer them). What we want is the big guy.

Rimbert makes five wines with carignan. Three are mixes, two are 100-per-cent carignan. His main table wine is the 100-per-cent Chant de Marjolaine. It's a very nice wine; you could drink a lot of it. But the ones I want to try are the ones he's legendary for: the Mas au Schist – “Hill of schist,” but say it out loud and you'll get the joke – and a wine he calls, with a straight face, Carignator II. (There was a Carignator I, but it's all drunk up.)

I find it pointless to try to describe the taste of a wine, as wine books and the many experts who feed on wine do, but you can describe the personality of a wine almost as thoroughly as you do a person. Wine has gone through the processes of experience that change it from one state to another as surely as a child becomes an adult.

So wine can be bright and intelligent, direct, energetic, even funny. (You put your nose into a glass with a faded red colour, expecting a musty, bricky smell, and fresh cherries blossom in your face. A marvellous joke, one worth toasting.) Wine can also be withdrawn, sullen, ungenerous. You can say what a wine tastes like, but “honeyed” can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but if you also say it's “seductive” they might begin to see it for themselves. They might even want to drink it.

When we get around to the Mas au Schist (he has been gabbing with Anne delightedly, as she watches his biceps move around inside his T-shirt),

I've had one of the 40-per-cent carignans.

It's just okay. The Travers de Marsau is 40-per-cent carignan, 30-per-cent syrah and 30-per-cent cinsault. It's actually a bit brutal – unwelcoming and heavy. The flavour of burnt caramel. Then comes the Mas au Schist. The only difference here is that the cinsault has been replaced by grenache, another very popular varietal, and used in many mixes. On this wine, it has an instantly civilizing effect, and where the Travers had a smoker's cough, this one has a low, sexy voice. It's still a hardy wine, but it's rounder, warmer. Jean Reno to the Travers' Jean Claude Van Damme.

Then comes Rimbert's Carignator II. (To keep in the cinema mode, its name brings images of Arnold Schwarzenegger to mind, and with good reason.) It's an astonishing distillation of five “millisimes” of carignan: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005. The 2004 was bad, says Rimbert, and went off to become rubbing alcohol and grapeseed oil. The resulting wine is the colour of dead rose petals and its personality is that of a roomful of friends chattering away. It's impossible to know which of the vintages lends the wine its meatiness, which its fruit, which its lingering, velvety, bronzy ache on the tongue. It's a masterpiece and he's very proud of it.

When I ask him how long you could lay it down for, he looks surprised and says, “It's ready now. I drink it now.” No doubt. My guess is, though, it won't weaken with time, and I'm delighted to have found a wine hidden in the mountains of Languedoc that could give any long-living pinot a run for its money. We buy three of the Carignator II and two of the Mas au Schist and when we get home, we find an extra bottle of the Carignator II (his most expensive wine at a laughable 16 euros) hiding in the box.

Experimentation, a firm grip of tradition (but not an enslavement) and a nod to youth are the touchstones of winemaking in Languedoc these days. French wine is not going anywhere: The best wines in the world are being made here and will be made here long after the next sauvignon blanc du jour has come and gone from New Zealand. The French are battling with the world markets, but they are also battling with their own past. Languedoc is a place where the near-dead soil grows remarkable fruit, but renewal is also planted here. Where once Languedoc was the bargain basement, it's turning boutique, and inventive new vintners are reinventing the land here.

Saint-Chinian is just a corner of it. We still have the majestic wines of the Corbières waiting for us, including the sub-AOC La Clape, two kilometres from us, where Château de la Négly's Jean Paux-Rosset produces some of the most important wines of the region. An hour away are grand crus of Daumas Gassac, and the legendary vins doux are just down the road: The great dessert wines of Rivesaltes and Banyuls and Maury are lesser known than those of Portugal's great ports, but not for any good reason. If I can spread the gospel of Rivesaltes, I'll have done a great thing with my time here.

In our afternoon at Domaine Rimbert, we'd stepped into Jean-Marie's cave to stand among the musty barrels of next year's wine, and he showed us a row of grenache. “I'm happy with the carignan,” he told us, “and now I want to try something else difficult. This year I'm going to make my first 100-per-cent grenache.” That's no mean feat, a pure grenache, but Rimbert is probably the man to do it. A good 100-per-cent grenache is like eating a whole chocolate cake by yourself, but the bad ones are like drinking jam. I take careful note of his plans and wonder if there will be any ready by the time we leave France, next summer. If so, I want to be the first in line to try Rimbert's Grenachator I. It might be the next great wine from Languedoc.

Michael Redhill is a playwright and fiction writer whose most recent novel, Consolation, was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. He lives in France with his partner and their two sons.