Languedoc-Roussillon is the largest vineyard in France and for most of the twentieth century the largest in the world, stretching in a crescent from the Rhône delta round the Golfe du Lion to the Spanish border. The Greeks planted here before the Romans, who shipped wine out of Narbonne across the empire, and the railways of the nineteenth century turned the coastal plain into the cheap wine factory that supplied industrial France.

The modern story is the reverse of that. Since the 1980s the plain has been replanted or abandoned and the work has moved back up into the hills, where limestone, schist and garrigue give low yields: Corbières, Minervois, Faugères, Pic Saint-Loup, Terrasses du Larzac, Collioure. Carignan, Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre and Cinsault make the reds, Picpoul, Grenache Blanc and Roussanne the whites, and Roussillon keeps the old fortified wines of Banyuls, Maury and Rivesaltes.