In 1989, when the French franc (remember?) was cheap and a pre-Ryanair wave of British romantics sought a slice of la France profonde, we bought half a house in Languedoc. It was a small village in Burgundy that had shown me how much more rural rural France seemed than rural Britain but I was worried that a holiday house in such an important wine region might be an oxymoron.

Back then, Languedoc and Roussillon, its Catalan neighbour to the south-west, were producing wines that seemed centuries less evolved than the great wines of France. I liked the idea that an array of styles was available in the region, but felt safe from feeling I ought to be spending my precious summer weeks of R&R visiting wine domaines.

When we arrived, grapes were virtually the only crop grown in Languedoc and it was their produce that largely filled the notorious EU wine lake with thin, characterless red that no one wanted to drink. Successive schemes were put in place to drain this lake and transform the landscape so that vines on the least propitious (flat and fertile) land were grubbed up. This left a more significant proportion growing in more promising sites at higher elevations, on slopes and on poorer soils so that yields were naturally lower and the resulting wine more interesting and concentrated. Only a small proportion of the vines that used to surround our house remain.