A wall mural celebrates Blanquette de Limoux outside the visitor's office on Avenue Fabre d'Eglantine   GALLERY PHOTO GALLERY: Take a photo tour of Limoux

December 28, 1999
Web posted at: 3:02 p.m. EST (2002 GMT)

By Jenna Milly
CNN Interactive Associate Editor

LIMOUX, France (CNN) -- Close to the Spanish border in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a French village stands proud with history as it claims to be the birthplace of sparkling wine.

Surrounded by hilly countryside and a bounty of vineyards, Limoux attracts tourists for more than its scenery. The experience of sitting at a cafe in the city's heart, the Place de la Republique, and sipping a chilled glass of the effervescent Blanquette de Limoux is what lures visitors to this 2,000-year-old village.

Equally enchanting is the charm of Limoux's history. In the mid-16th century, monks of the nearby Abbey of St. Hilaire developed a method of making sparkling wine almost 200 years before their rivals to the north. Present-day Champagne producers dismiss this notion, although the famed monk Dom Perignon did pass through Limoux before moving to Champagne.

The method developed by the monks in Limoux is called methode ancestrale. In this process, the bottle is sealed before the fermentation is complete, which creates natural bubbles in the wine.

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Unfortunately, this process leaves too much yeast sediment trapped in the bottle. Developing a more sophisticated style, producers from the Champagne region invented methode champenoise, which yields a sparkling wine without the sediment.

Most modern producers of Blanquette use methode champenoise. It is still possible, though, to find among small or private producers a bottle of vintage bubbly made according to methode ancestrale. By law, only producers in the Champagne region can officially call their sparkling wine Champagne -- just as only producers in the area surrounding Limoux can market their sparkling wine with the name Blanquette.

In the foreground sits the son of Gedeon Guinot, founder of Maison Guinot, corking bottles by hand in 1920

I toured the wine cellar of the one of the oldest family-run producers of Blanquette, Maison Guinot, which began in 1875. General director Michel Rancoule-Guinot oversees all production operations, including picking, harvesting, juicing and bottling.

French wine cellars are called caves, a fitting name for the underground location of Maison Guinot's cellar. Its cave is cool and damp, lit by only a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. As we weave though a maze of wine racks, Rancoule-Guinot reveals some of the tricks of making Blanquette.

The rooms are filled with hundreds of black bottles, all slanted cork down to settle the yeast. After the wine is bottled and corked, workers must rotate the slanted bottles daily until all the yeast has settled into the neck of the bottle. Later, using techniques of methode champenoise, the bottles are uncorked to release the sediment and then quickly sealed again.

Outside Maison Guinot, a giant bottle of Blanquette sits in the back of a 1935 Peugeot truck, which was once used to transport sparkling wine to restaurants and clients

In the vineyard, Rancoule-Guinot harvests his grapes by hand -- a tradition that, like many in Limoux, spans generations.

"We harvest manually, transport the grapes with small boxes and use a pneumatic press for airtight juicing," he says.

Some large vineyards use mechanical harvesting, which can damage the fruit, says Rancoule-Guinot. Over-packing into large containers sometimes crushes fruit, allowing premature pressing of the juices. The unwanted contact with oxygen can affect the quality of the wine.

Although Blanquette is not as widely known as Champagne, its taste has attracted buyers from around the world, including, says Rancoule-Guinot, Russian Czar Nicolas II and Japanese Emperor Akihito.

Testing the bubbly, both sweet and dry, after touring the wine cellar of Maison Guinot

Made with a blend of three white grapes -- mauzac, chenin and chardonnay -- Blanquette has a smooth, creamy texture. Often toasty with an apple flavor, the taste is simple and elegant. Nurtured with plenty of sun and a temperate climate, this special taste, according to Rancoule-Guinot, is influenced by the air and soil of Limoux and its proximity to the Pyrenees and the "sweetness of the Mediterranean Sea."

In recent years, Blanquette has become more popular as a tasty substitute for Champagne at half the price. Rancoule-Guinot exports about 40 percent of his wine outside France.

The United States is a new market for Blanquette. Maison Guinot can be found in California, while other Blanquettes such as St. Hilaire, Aimery and Antech can be found, respectively, in Atlanta, Chicago and New York.

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