Provence

A Greek foundation

Long before Rome carried the vine to the rest of Gaul, Greek settlers from Phocaea, on the coast of Asia Minor, founded the trading post of Massalia — today's Marseille — at the mouth of the Rhône, around 600 years before the common era. The cultivated vine came with them: tradition makes Provence one of the oldest wine-growing areas in France, predating by centuries the vineyards of the Rhône Valley or Burgundy. The Phocaeans found a climate and soils not unlike those of their native Mediterranean, suited to a crop that has never since left the land. That early start sets the region apart in the timeline of French viticulture: a Greek origin where most of the rest of the country owes its vines to Roman legionaries or medieval monks.

The mistral, and a divide between limestone and older rock

Provence's climate is Mediterranean — hot, dry summers, a mild winter, some of the highest sunshine totals in France — but it is the mistral that shapes it above all: a cold, dry wind that runs down the Rhône Valley before spreading out along the whole Provençal coast. Like the tramontane in the Languedoc, it keeps fungal pressure down. The ground beneath resists any single description. Limestone plateaus and hills from the secondary geological era dominate the north and west; to the south-east, toward the Maures and the Esterel massifs, far older primary-era crystalline rock — schist, gneiss, granite — comes to the surface. That limestone-versus-crystalline divide runs through the whole region, and separates strikingly different terroirs even within a single appellation such as Côtes de Provence.

Rosé as the dominant style, and what direct pressing and saignée actually do

Provence makes mostly rosé: the great majority of its output is rosé, most of it under the regional Côtes de Provence appellation. Two distinct methods produce it. Direct pressing treats black-grape fruit much as a white wine would be made: the juice, briefly in contact with the skins only for the duration of pressing and then separated from them before fermentation, picks up only a pale, salmon-toned colour from the skins' anthocyanins. Saignée works the other way round: a vat of black grapes is set to macerate as if for a red wine, and part of the must is "bled off" — drawn from the tank after anywhere from a few hours to a few days of skin contact — while the rest continues on to become red wine. The rosé that results is typically deeper in colour and more structured than one made by direct pressing, and bleeding off some juice is, for the grower, also a way of concentrating the red wine left behind. Both techniques are used across Provence, and saignée is one of the methods behind Bandol's own rosé.

Bandol, the region's red exception, built on Mourvèdre

On the Var coast near Toulon, the Bandol appellation runs counter to Provence's rosé logic. Its red wines, built on plantings in which Mourvèdre leads (50 to 95% of the vines), are given long ageing in wood — a minimum of eighteen months in barrels or large oak foudres set by the appellation's own rules — before release, which suits them to ageing, whereas most Provençal output, rosé, is drunk young. Mourvèdre, a late-ripening variety that demands real heat, finds on Bandol's dry-stone terraces around Le Castellet and its neighbouring communes one of its only French homes where it leads a blend outright rather than playing a supporting role, as it does in the southern Rhône or the Languedoc. Bandol's rosé, partly made by saignée, carries the same variety's imprint more visibly than rosé from the rest of the region.

Cassis, Côtes de Provence and Palette

Three further appellations round out the Provençal picture, each with a character of its own. Cassis, on the commune of the same name at Marseille's doorstep, is one of the very first appellations d'origine contrôlée in France, recognised by decree on 15 May 1936 — the same year as Châteauneuf-du-Pape — and remains, in spirit and in volume alike, primarily a white wine appellation, built on Clairette and Marsanne. Côtes de Provence, the largest of the three appellations grouped under the Conseil interprofessionnel des vins de Provence (CIVP) alongside Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence and Coteaux Varois en Provence, carries most of the region's rosé volume on its own. Palette, finally, is a tiny appellation straddling Aix-en-Provence, Meyreuil and Le Tholonet, and cultivates an unusually broad range of varieties for so small an area, down to rarities such as white Furmint or Muscat de Hambourg, ordinarily a table grape.