Roussillon

Act one, scene one.

Roussillon.

A room in the Countess's palace.

Enter Bertram, the Countess of Roussillon, Helena, and Lafeu, all in black.

Countess, in delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.

Bertram.

That minister was bent upon wresting from her the barrier of fortresses which made French safety or extension to the northeast impossible.

For this purpose he proposed to exchange the Spanish Low Countries for Catalonia and Roussillon, then in the possession of France.

But Spain hoped in view of the confusion caused in France by the civil troubles, then nearly at their height, to regain Catalonia and Roussillon by force of arms.

The Spanish Netherlands she determined to save in another way.

She resolved to bow to necessity and to close her long and profitless struggle with her rebellious subjects.

By a preliminary arrangement on February 1659, all the conquests made by France previous to the English alliance were to remain hers forever.

But the places captured by Turenne in the last campaign, except Mardique, which was held by France, and Dunkirk, which was retained by England, with Valence, Mortara in Italy, and several towns in Catalonia, were to be restored to Spain.

Artois, with the exception of Aire and Saint-Omer, Roussillon and Alsace, became French soil.

It allows some of those more marginal sites to actually enter into that region.

And really I see, I haven't talked to a representative from the Atlantic IGP, but I see them positioning this region in the market to sort of compete with some of the bulk wine production that you see in the south of France and that sort of Languedoc, Roussillon region.

They tend to make light dry whites, you know, a lot of them are Sainte-Saphe Blancs.

You're also seeing some Chardonnays from these regions, that kind of thing.

And then with the exit of the English, we really see the Dutch being the people who move into this wine market here and start purchasing and trading these all throughout Europe.

So there is quite a lot of love for these wines in Europe, but not necessarily in the Anglophone market.

And I think really importantly, as we sort of start to see this, as we sort of enter the more modern wine industry, once rail transportation sort of comes online, it allows a lot of these sort of Languedoc, Roussillon, cheaper bulk-produced wines to have a lot more accessibility.

And sort of a lot of these wine regions never really broke their confinement there.