There’s a weekly investigative TV show called Complément d’enquête (we’d say that’s “Further Investigation”) that’s been around for years. For an hour they look into subjects that might have been in the news but the producers feel that there’s perhaps more to the story. Naturally the focus is on France although the impact could stretch well beyond its borders. Topics have included Lance Armstrong, Club Med, pollution, the Pope, supermarkets, and actor Gérard Depardieu. We were particularly interested in a segment called, “Bordeaux, Champagne: when crooks attack our bottles” especially because the newspaper said it involved one of our favorite local wine growing areas, far from either of those regions mentioned in the show’s title.

For a quick historical background, because this area of the country is so well adapted to growing grapes, even 2000 years ago the Romans exported wine from here, literally by the boatload. It was a process of quantity over quality that was reinforced in 1868 when vineyards were devastated by the phylloxera insect, so all remaining vines and new resistant ones were quickly turned into a cash crop without much regard for standards, simply to save the industry. A slow turnaround began in 1938 when our favorite sparkling wine, Blanquette de Limoux, received national recognition but it took until the 1980s for a majority of producers to fully understand the impact of raising the caliber of their products. Today, our region of Occitanie is France’s largest producer of organic wines and not far behind the world’s leader in total wine production, La Mancha, Spain.

That leads us back to Bordeaux and vintner Jean-Baptiste Duquesne, who calls himself a “pirate” who is not a believer in the gold-silver-bronze medal award system, despite his own wines having won many of these. To prove his point, he took a Complément d’enquête TV crew with him to a supermarket to purchase a bottle of white wine for 3.50€ and a red for 1.99€. Sadly, given the above quantity-over-quality history that locals here would like to move past, both of these came from our area and even worse for Bill and me, the red was a Corbières, an area that produces the “Rolls Royce of reds”, as one neighborhood wine shop owner says, and we agree. By the way, this Château de la Voulte Gasparets, Romain Pauc, AOC Corbières Boutenac, photo to the left, retails for around 23€.

Back at his own vineyard, the “pirate” rebottled the supermarket purchases, used his château’s label to mark them as “clarets” and shipped them off with 2 genuine bottles from his own cellar to be judged. Three weeks later the results came back that all 4 bottles had received gold awards and excellent tasting notes.

To better understand the process, I went to the website of Gilbert & Gaillard, the winery that established the challenge in 2018 and that already has 42,000 wines in their evaluation database. On their application form they clearly answer 2 questions that I had: they do blind taste testing and the judging entrance fee is 45€ per wine.

Monsieur Duquesne feels that “the selection process has no value and is purely commercial”. I did wonder about his second point and whether or not those award stickers that we see anytime that we’re in a supermarket have influenced us. In Carcassonne we have our favorite wine caves where recommendations from the staff are easily obtained but when we’re traveling it’s different. Often it’s a case of popping into a convenient supermarket to grab something to go with our lunch sandwiches onboard the train or to have in the hotel room as an apéro before going out to dinner. If we are otherwise indecisive, that award sticker definitely calls out, “Pick me!”