Going wild about salad in the Languedoc

Didier Barral gives new meaning to the expression 'a fresh salad'.

“Would you like to pick some salad?,” my maître de stage, Didier Barral, asked me one afternoon late in my wine-making internship required for my French œnology diploma. We had just finished moving the 50-or-so semi-wild cows that he allows to graze in different parcels of his vineyard after the grapes are harvested. This twice-weekly “round-up” was necessary to ensure that the cows only munched on the upper portions of the grapevine branches, and not the lower portions with next year’s buds.

I thought that he meant picking some lettuce in his mother’s vegetable garden next to the wine cellar; the garden that had been invaded recently by wild boar for the first time in anyone’s memory. No doubt, she and the rest of the Barral family surmised, it was the extended drought that had driven the animals to search for the moisture in her late-season tomatoes and rooty vegetables.

But no, that wasn’t the place he had in mind. He grabbed a penknife out of the pocket of the door of his car and sprinted up the hillside. The hungry cows moved aside as he plowed through them, his head focused on the sparse undergrowth that pushed up between the rows of vines. This wind-swept plateau in the Faugères wine appellation offered a magnificent 360-degree view of the low-lying mountains to the north and, but for the hazy, low-lying clouds, the Mediterranean coast 30 or so kilometers south of us would, too, have been visible.

'Is that a cow in your salad?'

His haste was immediately evident, as I could see that the cows had already begun munching on the low-lying vegetation that he was now examining. What I thought were weeds, it turns out, were a half-dozen different types of wild salad. As we moved among the cows, he began cutting the roots and handing them to me. I didn’t write down the French names for them, but I’m reasonably sure, having looked at some websites for wild salad, that chickweed, sorrel and wild mustard were among the plants that we picked.

Barral told me that he knew, personally, of around 20 wild salad greens found within his vineyards, but that his 99-year-old grandmother could identify many more. I won’t mention terroir or biodynamics here, but this pleasantly bitter and exquisitely succulent, chemical-free wild salad was among the best that I’ve ever eaten, and it spoke clearly about how food, like wine, has a time and place.

(Right) This slightly out-of-focus plant is inedible, yet still useful. Barral said that it was called the “mouren” “mouron” in French, and that the color of its flowers indicated the pH of the soil. When the plant has blue flowers, as here, the soil is basic or alkaline. When there are red flowers, the soil is acidic. When there are both colors present on the plant, the soil is neutral.

Tagged as: Faugères, Languedoc