Corbières is the Languedoc in a glass: garrigue hills rolling between Carcassonne and the Mediterranean, where old head-trained Carignan is lifted by Grenache and Syrah into wines of bay leaf, black olive and warm stone. Vines have grown here since antiquity, but the modern story is one of mass and recovery.
For a century these slopes helped pour France's daily litre, feeding the cities with cheap red until overproduction and fraud broke the market. The crash came in 1907, when the winegrowers' revolt led by Marcelin Albert brought half a million protesters into the streets of Montpellier. The long rebuilding that followed turned on quality: lower yields, the value of gnarled old Carignan finally recognised, and an appellation that now trades on its landscape rather than its volume.