"The wines of Limagne?" I hear you ask; what wines are those? They have now almost completely vanished from our cellars and shelves, but in the nineteenth century they were important for the domestic market in France. Limagne is a plain in the Massif Central. Vines are still grown around the towns of Corent and Châteaugay, under the appellation of Cotes d'Auvergne. These had dwindled to the level of VDQS, but the process has begun to have them elevated to appellation contrôlée status. What kind of wines are they? The grape types grown today are chardonnay and gamay, and the wines, whether red or white, tend towards the light and fragrant. Hardly suitable, then, one would have thought, to accompany Des Esseintes's black food. In the paperwork supporting the bid for elevation to appellation contrôlée status, it is specified that yields of up to a very generous 55 hectolitres per hectare will be permitted in the Cotes d'Auvergne. It seems that no one in Limagne wishes any longer to make dark, heavily extracted wines. And yet, if Huysmans is to be believed, in the 1880s some such wines were made in Limagne, and in sufficient quantities for it not to be an evident false note for Des Esseintes to have specified them for his "black dinner". What were these wines made of, and what did they taste like? How has such a viticultural tradition disappeared so completely?
If the wines of Limagne are a surprising inclusion, there are also some surprising omissions. The backwardness of Italian viticulture in the 19th century would perhaps explain the absence of any wine made from the negroamaro grape — "the black and bitter one"— from Des Esseintes's dinner. It is only comparatively recently that these forbiddingly tannic and dark red wines have been exported in any quantity from the heel of Italy, where they are grown just north of Lecce. It would be astonishing had Huysmans ever heard of, let alone drunk them.
We might pause longer over another surely striking omission, namely that of the famous "black wine" of Cahors. Long ago this wine, made from the Malbec (or, as it is called locally, the Auxerrois) grape had a reputation for depth, durability and complexity (sometimes it seems achieved by the artifice of boiling up the grape juice) which eclipsed the comparatively thin wines of Bordeaux. Why then did Huysmans ignore them? Here we encounter a striking coincidence. A Rebours was published in 1884. Just four years beforehand, in 1880, the vineyards of Cahors had been devastated by phylloxera — the small aphid and natural ally of the temperance movement whose sole food is the roots of vines. Given the tendency in France to drink young even wines which are capable of ageing, it may be that had Des Esseintes wished to serve the "black wine" of Cahors at his dinner party, there would have been none available.
