The Wildly Elegant Cru

In Southern France, Mas de Daumas Gassac has elevated the reputation and winemaking practices of the Languedoc region once known for its low-quality table wines.

- LAUREN TAN

For wine lovers, a good story can be as important as authenticity and typicity. Mas de Daumas Gassac offers all three.

Even the estate’s founding was serendipitous. When Aimé and Véronique Guibert, a tanner and glove manufacturer, and his ethnologist wife, were out walking in rural Gassac Valley in the late 1960s, they came across an abandoned farmhouse near the abbey of Aniane. It was surrounded by wheat fields, oak trees, mulberry, olive trees, and some vines. For the Guiberts, it was love at first sight. Despite having no agricultural experience, except for a vegetable patch in their garden in Millau, they decided to purchase the estate from its retired owners.

Unsure of what to cultivate, the novice farmers invited Henri Enjalbert, a geographer at the University of Bordeaux to help them decide. To their surprise, Enjalbert discovered that the site’s perfectly drained soil consisted of glacial sandstone comparable to the best terroirs of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. Without a doubt, their destiny lay in those vines.

Cabernet sauvignon was planted in 1972, and in 1978 oenologist Emile Peynaud, who consulted for Bordeaux first growths Châteaux Margaux and Haut-Brion, was hired to advise and mentor the family. Later, when asked by journalists why he chose to advise an unknown property in the Languedoc, he replied: “There, for the first time, I had the good fortune to be present at the birth of a grand cru”.