Limoux Wine - History

History

Records show that Livy traded in non-sparkling white wines from Limoux as far back as the Roman occupation of the region.

Blanquette de Limoux is considered to be the first sparkling white wine produced in France, created long before the Champagne region became world renowned for the sparkling wine Champagne. The first textual mention of "blanquette", from the Occitan expression for "the small white", appeared in 1531 in papers written by Benedictine monks at an abbey in Saint-Hilaire. They detail the production and distribution of Saint-Hilaire's blanquette in cork-stoppered flasks. The region's location, north of the Cork Oak forest of Cataluña, gave Limoux producers easy access to the material needed to produce secondary fermentation in the flask, which produces the bubbles necessary for sparkling wine.

Local lore suggests that Dom Pérignon invented sparkling white wine while serving in this Abbey before moving to the Champagne region and popularizing the drink, but this is almost certain to be false since Dom Pérignon was involved with improving Champagne's still wines, and not the sparkling ones.

In 1938, Blanquette de Limoux became the first AOC established in the Languedoc region. While the classification is recent, the wine itself has long been a traditional apéritif or dessert accompaniment in the area.

In recent decades, appellation rules have been relaxed to allow an increased use of international grape varieties, which have partially replaced Mauzac.