Didier Barral: Rebel with a cause

The only result from six calls to try and arrange a meeting with Languedoc wine maker Didier Barral was his mother, who was the only one who ever seemed to answer the number that I had been given to contact him, was now able to recognize immediately my American-accented French. I decided to take a chance on running into him during an Easter holiday stay with friends in the Hameau de Lenthéric, the tiny hamlet where Domaine Léon Barral (named for his grandfather) is located. Lenthéric, which is part of the Faugères Wine Appellation, is in the Haut Languedoc, north of Béziers.

Barral is one of the best-known wine makers in what has been a traditionally undervalued appellation for vintage wines. That is changing as talented and innovative wine makers are learning how to use the mineral-rich schist of the area to produce balanced, full-bodied red wines from the Mediterranean grape varieties—carignan, grenache and mourvèdre, which the appellation requires, along with syrah.

My friend, who sold most of his family’s vineyard property almost 20 years ago to work in IT and then to teach in an agricultural high school, introduced me to Didier Barral’s brother Jean-Luc, who told us that Didier would be replanting a vineyard that afternoon just outside of the hamlet and that I could speak to him there.

While walking down the small country road that traverses Lenthéric, passing by the two Stop signs—set approximately 100 meters apart, that delineate the hamlet’s limits, I thought of a wine book that I’d just finished reading. Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country, by Robert Camuto. The book has a chapter provocatively titled “Poop and People in the New French Wine Country” that discusses Barral’s biodynamic methods to improve the health of his vineyard. The undoubted inspiration for the chapter’s title, a small-house-sized pile of manure, composed of a cocktail of every type of animal excrement available in rural France, was now coming into view. I elected to keep my distance and to admire it from afar.

Shortly afterwards, I passed several cows and horses and a family of pigs roaming freely in the vineyards–another Barral viticultural innovation, before crossing a small bridge and walking through some 30-to-40-year-old vines that were immediately below the field that was being replanted.

The field was being prepared for planting by Barral and his brother, who I had already met, along with several of their young children and three vineyard workers. A backhoe had already cleared the larger scrub trees and thorn branches, a tractor with a blade attached vertically behind it had made long trenches across the field, and they now were busy staking out lines the length and width of the field to determine where to plant the vines. After greeting me, Barral dropped to his stomach and motioned me to come closer. At a point where the backhoe had ripped out a bush, he showed me how the soil resembled a birthday cake with a thin layer of dark topsoil covering the grayish layer of dirt and rock below. That topsoil, he explained, was there thanks to the cows that he allowed to roam his vineyards.

This field, he told me, had laid fallow since his father had ripped out the vines 20 or more years earlier. Those vines were of a variety of grape, he added, that is now prohibited in France. The Jacquez variety, which originated in the eastern United States, comes from the species Vitis bourquiniana instead of the Vitus vinifera grape varieties commonly used to make wine. Because it was not susceptible to the Phylloxera that decimated French vineyards at the end of the 19th Century, it was used for rootstocks. The intensely colored grapes produce a deep, dark-colored juice with a distinctive flavor. There’s no problem eating the grapes or drinking the juice, but, when fermented, the resulting wine has a high level of toxic methanol alcohol. Barral observed that people drinking wine from the Jacquez wine became “fou”, French for “crazy.” And probably blind, I thought silently to myself. [I now have second thoughts about the Jacquez grape; see comment below].

He was replanting with a white grape variety called Servant. This traditional variety had  fallen out of favor as Languedoc wine makers experimented with grape varieties, like Chardonnay, from more northern French wine regions. Unlike these cooler climate varieties that ripen too quickly in the region’s Mediterranean climate, Barral explained, the Servant grapes would not be harvested before mid-October, giving them higher acidity at a lower alcohol level.

The vine planting, in efficient assembly-line fashion, went on all afternoon. Two workers would stretch a line tightly above the trench cut by the tractor blade. Tape, which was wound around the line at one-meter intervals, showed them where each vine would be planted. Then Barral, wielding a giant T-shaped bar like a giant corkscrew, would come along and thrust it into the trench vigorously to create a deep hole.

But, before the one-foot-long root stock, with its paraffin wax cap to protect the tender vine shoot, went into the ground, there was another step. Barral’s four-year-old son’s job was to dip the roots of each stock into a bucket of foul-smelling paste that looked like children’s Play-Doh gone bad. He was obviously having the most fun of anyone, as more of the paste was getting on him then on the rootstock. I kiddingly said to Barral that I was going to take a sample of the paste back to the US to have it analyzed. He laughed and said that the “secret” sauce was a mix of cow and pigeon excrement combined with clay.

I’m not sure, and I didn’t ask, if Barral is out there burying cow horns or scattering the ashes of dead field mice in his vineyards, or any of the other more mystical methods used in biodynamic viticulture. His wine is labeled biodynamic, and he’s certainly sincere and serious in believing that his vineyards are self-contained organisms and that his wine is better for his having managed the biochemical and microbiological factors in his soil.

In fact, I suspect that Barral’s objective is to produce a wine that is less about taste and more about expressing the terroir of his land. Leon Barral wines are imported to the US by Berkely, California-based wine importer Kermit Lynch, who was made a Chavalier de la Legion d’Honneur, the top honor bestowed on civilians in France, for his work and writing about small French producers who make unfined, unfiltered wine in traditional ways. There are many tasting notes available for Barral’s wine that extol its “mineral, rounded liquorice and herbal characters.” There is no lack, however, of less complimentary remarks, noting “musty, funky, gamey animal smells with notes of tar, shoe polish or rubber,” and other equally less attractive odors. Like many things in life, you either like a Leon Barral wine or you dislike it.

Does Didier Barral lose any sleep over this? I don’t think so. He comes across, and even looks slightly like—with his lean, compact frame, short-cropped hair and light eyes, Steve McQueen as “Papillon” in the film of the same name. Instead of tossing a baseball up and down as he goes off, whistling, to his solitary-confinement cell, Barral is happy to play the rebel in the vineyard, in tune with nature and making wine his way.

Tagged as: Faugères, Languedoc