Château Rouquette sur Mer

The estate lies between Narbonne and the Mediterranean, in the La Clape massif, next to Narbonne Plage.

It is worth knowing what it is planted on. La Clape was an island off the Languedoc coast, and it did not join the mainland until the fourteenth century, when the sediment the Aude carried down from the Pyrenees finally silted up the channel between them. The vineyard grows, quite literally, on what was once an island.

There are some fifty hectares of vines, and they do not form a single block: they are spread in clearings within a property of several hundred hectares of garrigue and pine. Most of the estate remains unplanted.

In the fifteenth century it belonged to the Viscountess of Narbonne. Jacques Boscary has owned it since 1970. The old Château Rouquette, built in the thirteenth century and remodelled in the eighteenth, still stands in ruins.