Splendor in Solitude

The Wines of Irouléguy, in French Basque Country

ST.-ÉTIENNE-DE-BAÏGORRY, France — On a Saturday morning, this village in the French Pyrenees seems like any other small French town. Shoppers wend through the outdoor market while tourists snap photos. But resounding above the ordinary fray are the cries of young men playing pelote, a game akin to jai alai.

On an outdoor fronton, or court, adjacent to the market, using a basket shaped like a scimitar, they hurl a hard ball against a wall; it ricochets skyward at incredible speeds, sometimes flying onto the street, obliging passers-by to keep their heads up. Taking it all in, you realize that St.-Étienne, in the heart of Irouléguy in French Basque Country, is a different kind of place.

So it is with the wines of Irouléguy (ee-RHOO-lay-ghee), very much part of the constellation of appellations found in the southwest of France yet separate and distinct. It’s not that the grapes are different — the reds are made of tannat, as in Madiran, and cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon, as in Bordeaux and Bergerac. Whites are made of gros manseng, petit manseng and petit courbu, as in Jurançon.

Yet the land, the climate, the language and the culture remain apart, isolated by the Pyrenees, which wrinkle upward in a confluence of steep, verdant slopes like the sides of a giant bowl, containing this land of picturesque towns, rivers and patchwork farms. The wine expresses those differences as plainly as the Basque differs from the French on the region’s dual-language signs.

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