History
Viticulture was likely introduced to the area soon after the ancient Greeks introduced winemaking to the Languedoc are in the 6th century BC. Under the Romans, viticulture spread throughout the area with the nearby cities of Narbonne, Carcassonne and Perpignan being major centers for the trade of Roussillon wine from areas like Collioure. For a large part of its history, the region has been under Spanish rule and was even a part of the Catalonia region until the mid-17th century. Like other Roussillon wine regions, this Spanish influence can be seen in the types of wines produced here. Even today, wine experts such as Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson describe the wines of Collioure as being more like Spanish wines in profile than French.
The history of the Collioure region has been closely linked to the wines of Banyuls. For several centuries, grapes produced in this region was used to produced the fortified wine that gained an international reputation. It wasn't until 1971 that the region gained it own identity with an AOC established for production of non-fortified red wines.
Read more about this topic: Collioure AOC
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)