Home | About Grapevine | Wedding and Party Service | Contact Us | Special Offers | FAQ's | Newsletter | Accessories and Gifts South West A note on ageing the wines: Click here About the Region The South West is France's great undiscovered wine region, steeped in traditional winemaking practices and positively bristling with deliciously obscure grape varieities. Click here for more background on the region Some Key Regional Grape Varieties: Red: Malbec (Cahors), Tannat (Madiran), Négrette (Fronton), Petit Verdot - White : Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng (Jurançon), Click here for more grape varieties Click here for other Regions The Region The South West of France is one of the country’s last great ‘undiscovered’ wine regions, often only given a cursory mention, if at all, on wine lists or on shelves. The region - with its immense variety of landscapes, dialects and cuisines - is in fact a treasure house of traditional terroirs producing an abundance of distinctive wines all with strong personalities and unique regional accents. Delicious and exotic grape varieties abound, some of which have found their way onto the world stage as the varietal products of other countries or regions, and some of which have remained delightfully more or less obscure, nestled in their little corner of France. ‘Le Sud Ouest’ has not always been a quiet wine backwater, though. For several centuries, from at least the 12th century right through to the late 17th / early 18th centuries, Bordeaux was producing questionable wine at best. In fact it was the vineyards of the South West – or ‘Haut-Pays’ as the patchwork of different wine producing areas upriver from Bordeaux was then known - that were the powerhouses of French wine production. So highly rated were these wines – especially the powerful ‘black wine’ from Cahors – that the Bordelais even took to blending them with their own (at that time) rather feeble, watery wines so as to make them more marketable. A long period of gradual decline set in for the wines of the haut-pays starting in the early 18th century, with the rise to dominance of the Bordeaux Châteaux and culminating in the phylloxera aphid disaster of the late 19th century. This utterly ravaged the region since almost all its land was given over to viticulture. Mass depopulation and a near-total abandonment of the vineyards was the result. It has taken the region the best part of a century to recover, and now the fruits of the dedicated labour of a small number of local growers and a collection of a new generation of winemakers can be enjoyed once more in many of its wonderful historic wines. In its broadest sense, ‘le Sud Ouest’ covers the area that runs east from Bordeaux to Entraygues in the high country of the upper Lot valley, and south from there to the Pyrenees, dividing roughly along the line of what the French call ‘le partage des eaux’, the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, which itself runs very approximately from Entryagues in the north to the town of Castelnaudry in the south. Back to top