SOPEXA is to French food and wine what Bord Bainne is to Irish butter. An invitation from SOPEXA to explore the delights of wine-growing in the south of France was not to be lightly rejected.
I would have preferred to explore the delights of winegrowing in Champagne, Burgundy or Bordeaux but these regions, unaccountably, sold their produce without my endorsement. On the other hand, the Midi needed me. And so I found myself on a flight to Montpellier with halfa-dozen Irish wine-buyers.
SOPEXA assigned us a minder, an austere woman called Catherine. She saw her role as getting us down to breakfast early in the morning and on to our coach for the first wine-tasting at 10 a.m.
Tasting wine at 10 a.m. is not generally to be recommended. Tasting most wines of the Midi at any time is not to be recommended, generally or otherwise. The sunny climate produces a wine that is high in alcohol, deep in colour and spectacularly short on sublety.
Our first stop was a co-opowned vineyard where the manager had arranged a tasting in a room with white plastic furnishings. We could have been in an operating theatre. And in a way, we were. We tasted 40 wines before lunch, one more execrable than the next.
The buyer from Quinns worth was working his pocket calculator. He figured that one particular wine would cost 45p a bottle but with VAT and excise duties he could not put it on the shelves for less than £1.50. "Don't worry", said the manager. "I've got cheaper stuff that's even worse." I sometimes wonder how this man's career progressed. Probably something big in dot.com today.
After our marathon tasting, lunch was in the port of Sete. Our host was a local wine-shipper. He pointed to a small tanker in the port. She had come from Algeria, he explained, and was carrying African wine. "Sometimes," he said. "our local wine is a little thin and needs some fortification." Christine, the SOPEXA minder, looked as though she might choke on her olive oil.
Lunch with wine-growers tends to be leisurely, seldom consisting of fewer than seven courses. But Catherine would have us back in the coach for the afternoon tastings. I don't remember much about them.
Dinner was early. We were in Cathar country. The Albigensian legacy in still felt south of Toulouse. Window-shutters on houses were closed by 8 p.m. Early nights and ascetic habits - Apart from our hotel, where we dined very well and drank very badly. The Midi is proud of its wines and will not import interlopers from Bordeaux or Burgundy.
The hotel owner told us stories of Simon de Montfort, hired by the Pope to put the Albigensian heretics out of business. Such was the reputation of de Montfort's army that even the local Catholics were afraid. De Montfort rounded up the heretics in the cathedral at Bezier, where they were joined by Catholics. "What shall I do?", de Montfort inquired of the Papal Legate. "Burn them all", said the legate, "God will recognise his own".
Catherine had us on the coach early in the morning. We were bound for the Domaine de Gourgazaud. Finally, we found a Midi wine which was not only drinkable, but was very good. The vineyard had an art gallery in situ and the lady of the house presided over the cooking of a barbecue of lamb cutlets. Catherine was miserable. Her Irish charges were enjoying themselves. She ordered an immediate evacuation.
That night, in Carcasonne, we revolted. We told SOPEXA we wanted some leisure time and no 10 a.m. wine tastings. Catherine called her boss in Paris and he agreed that our wine-tasting ordeal should be curtailed. No more than 20 tastings before lunch.
Relations with Catherine became a bit fraught. She felt she has lost face - down to 20 tastings before lunch. It was a little like Bord Bainne offering margarine.
On our last night, however, we did her proud. The Irish wine-buyers - from Quinnsworth, Superquinn, Doyle Hotels - placed orders for Midi wines which caused great rejoicing at SOPEXA. We took an Air Inter flight from Montpellier to Paris. After a week of Midi wines, we were in no humour for deficient inflight service. We were offered a small selection of wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon area, which we had come to hate. One of the wine-buyers spoke for us all when he said : "Stop poncing about and bring me a Scotch."