Stones, wind, silence.

I remember dusk in the Corbières, standing by a road on the way to Embres et Castelmaure, looking out into the geological scrapyard of crags and boulders. The scene was as lonely as Arizona: no car would be through before morning. You could smell the night coming on, though, as the warm air moved down to the sea, freighted with the odour of tough, oily little plants. I remember a winter visit to Camplazens in La Clape: la bise was blowing across the bare, red lime vineyards so penetratingly it seemed ready to shatter the stones. And spring in the Minervois, on the way to meet Michel Escande: a sunlit moment, a clearing, light and its dry warmth filling the spaces between each leaf on the broom and the holm oak, the landscape bright with mimosa. And every time I wondered why this place isn’t producing the most sought-after wines in the world.

The raw materials seem so right. Step back from the Mediterranean plain and you are quickly into the lost hills from which the cold spring air and the occasional torrential rain can drain. The slopes face all points of the compass: north for fresh whites; south for rich reds. The austere mineral food – limestone, schist, slate, sandstone, even sand itself -- is what vines love; the scented garrigue plants seem to testify to some coiled, aromatic energy hidden deep in the stones. That north wind is dry and health-bringing: bad news for fungus, but good news for painters, photographers and wine-growers.

Many of Languedoc-Roussillon’s problems can be ascribed to a long historical hangover. “The grand people, that’s to say Monsieur le Marquis, Monsieur de Comte, all those Messieurs from here and there, they say that I’m nobbling the quality of my wine. What use is education? It only muddles your wits. Listen: those gentlement harvest seven, maybe eight barrels per arpent and they sell them at 60 francs each, which makes at most 400 francs per arpent in the good years. Me, I harvest 20 barrels and sell them at 30 francs, total 600 francs. Who’s the dimwit? Quality, quality! What use is quality to me? They can keep it for themselves, all those Marquises. For me, quality is a five-franc piece.” Thus Père Séchard in Balzac’s Les illusions perdues. Between 1850 and 1869, production in Hérault rose 380 per cent to over 15 million hectolitres; by the end of the century, after phylloxera had been and gone, Languedoc produced 44 per cent of all French wine – from only 23 per cent of France’s vines. The productivist philosophy of Père Séchard triumphed, and it has taken a century for quality to re-establish itself. The wine riots which occasionally erupt in the region are the twitches of old Languedoc’s corpse.

You don’t, though, suddenly create great wine overnight. The land needs interpreting, studying, reading. The lexicon it uses, after the twin metamorphoses of viticulture and fermentation, is aroma and flavour. The truths and potential beauties of terroir are only revealed when yields are low, viticulture fastidious and winemaking informed by solicitous restraint. It is this struggle for knowledge and understanding which has resulted in what often seems to foreign eyes like an over-complicated appellation system. Coteaux du Languedoc, for example (the oldest vineyards in France, first planted by the Greeks in the fifth century BC) is, in its third millennium, more like a school for appellations than a finished unit, broken up into at least 13 different zones, some of which have already achieved their own AOCs (like St Chinian and Faugères) and some of which haven’t yet (like La Clape or Pic St Loup). Corbières, at present France’s fourth largest appellation (after Bordeaux, Bordeaux Supérieure and Côtes du Rhône), is considering atomisation into eleven zones, with Boutenac first off the blocks; Minervois has had a cru of its own since 1998 -- La Livinière. Other new appellations interestingly mingle Languedoc and Bordeaux grape varieties (like Limoux Rouge, Côtes de la Malpère and Carbardès); the Roussillon is France’s own dollop of Catalonia, a northern cousin of dense, mineral Priorat and Montsant; and then there are all the Vins de Pays, too, where the game is a different one, and where truth to variety is more important than truth to soil.

Differences are emerging; greatness, occasionally, too. There is, at all times, the excitement of the chase and the journey of discovery. Every new vintage reveals a little more, and the good or great vintages in the region (like 2001, 2004 and 2005) create new high-water marks for quality. One of the litmus tests for fine wine is its ability to age, and the way my 1998 Mas Jullien from Olivier Jullien and 2001 La Torre from Jean Gardiés are turning out suggests that the best Languedoc-Roussillon wines now reward cellar experiment.

Prices remain within the comfort zone. If you want to play the game of distinguishing Corton-Charlemagne from Chevalier-Montrachet, it costs £40 or more per bottle to play; if you want to contrast the vivid, perfumed Syrah of Pic St Loup from the denser, more mineral Syrah of St Chinian, the entry ticket is a quarter of the price. The value is often outstanding, as so often from growers who have something to prove rather than laurels to sit on.

Finally, too, relish the style of the wines. I’ve been reflecting on their quest for greatness in the paragraphs above, but part of me doesn’t ever want them to become ‘great’ – if greatness means polish, urbanity, unctuousness, sweet ripeness and forests of oak. For the time being, these are some of the most savoury, thorny and wild wines in France. Their tannins are brisk; their acidity fresh and natural; their aroma and flavour repertoires unconfected. Like a wild boar encountered at dusk on a woodland path, they are singular, authentic, unapologetic. They seem, in sum, an exuberance of nature. In a wine world of products and packages at one extreme, and of positions and portfolios at the other, we need them.