The Secret Garden of Faugères

Domaine de Clovallon & Mas d’Alezon

There is a door in a hillside in Faugères that most people will never walk through.

It doesn’t look like much. A weathered frame, overgrowth pressing in from both sides, the kind of entrance you’d walk past without a second glance. But step through it, and you’re somewhere else entirely. A few terraces of ancient vines, twisted and unhurried, growing in a silence that feels earned. This is the plot Alex tends for the old man who can no longer do it himself. He still comes to look after his trees. She comes for the vines. Between them, something extraordinary is being kept alive.

I visited with James Hill from Hampton Manor last April. We’d come to see both estates - Domaine de Clovallon and Mas d’Alezon - and to spend time with the two women who have, between them, quietly redrawn what’s possible in the Languedoc. Catherine Roque, the mother, and Alix, her daughter. An architect turned vigneron and the next generation who took the baton and pushed further.

Catherine arrived in the Hérault in 1987. She was an architect by training - a Parisian - and she left that world behind to plant vines in a region that barely registered on the fine wine map. The move was either reckless or visionary, depending on which year you asked. She planted Pinot Noir and Riesling in southern France, among the schist and garrigue of the Languedoc hills, when everything around her was Grenache, Syrah, and Carignan. Nobody was doing this. That was precisely the point.

By 1997 she had extended her reach into the northern edge of Faugères, acquiring the high-altitude plots that became Mas d’Alezon. The highest vineyards in the appellation. Up to 450 metres, on blue schist that looks almost geological - ancient seabed metamorphosed into something sparse and stark. Infertile, slow, uncompromising. The kind of terroir that doesn’t give anything easily, which is exactly why what comes out of it can’t be replicated anywhere else.

In 2012, Catherine handed Clovallon to Alix. What she passed on wasn’t just the vines - it was a philosophy. Biodynamic from the start. Indigenous yeasts. No fining, no filtering. Minimum intervention, maximum attention. The idea that a wine should taste of its place, not of the winery.

Alix has taken that and made it more intimate still. The way she talks about biodynamics is not theoretical - it’s almost homeopathic. Local flora, local herbs, used as preparations against whatever challenge the farm is facing. She treats the vines less like crops and more like a community she is responsible for. The old plot - the one reached through that doorway - is the clearest expression of this. She didn’t inherit it. She was given licence over it. The old man trusted her with it because it was obvious she understood what these vines needed. She gathers winemaking friends each harvest to pick by hand, a small vintage ritual. The wine it produces - Indijen - is a field blend of ancient varieties, red and white, grown together, picked together, made together. There is no category for it. There doesn’t need to be.

We tasted through the range with Alix. The Clovallon white built from Pinot Noir and Riesling is one of those wines that takes a moment to place - because you can’t. There’s a golden, textured depth to it, a tannic thread that pulls it somewhere between white and orange. It defies a straight answer. Deliberately. It tastes like the result of a very specific idea pursued over thirty years without compromise. The Mas d’Alezon Montfalette - predominantly Mourvèdre from those high-altitude schist plots - has that cool-climate restraint you rarely find this far south. Pepper, spice, elegance. Most Faugères doesn’t taste like this. It should.

The doorway keeps coming back to me though. The one that leads to the old man’s vines, kept alive by a woman who tends them as if they were her own - because for all practical purposes, they are. That is what organic and biodynamic farming actually looks like when it goes all the way. Not a certification, not a marketing position. A relationship with a piece of land, maintained out of love and a belief that the place deserves it.

Authentic sense of place is not made in the winery. It starts here. With a doorway in a hillside, and someone who knows what’s on the other side of it.