If their wine-growing is an act of resistance, I want to join the revolution

'Ive always been drawn to wines from fiercely independent regions fuelled by regional pride, from Spain's Basque Country, Catalonia and Canary Islands to Italy's South Tyrol, Sicily and Sardinia. This past summer, as the US edged toward authoritarian populism, I travelled to a French semi-autonomous wine region with the thought that a five-decades-past story of resistance might offer solace.

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Corsica’s jagged mountain peaks erupt from the sea and its steep hillsides teem with aromatic scrub. The region’s best wines are highly redolent of this maquis: eucalyptus, fennel, fig, juniper, laurel, mint, lavender, myrtle, rosemary, sage, strawflower, thyme.

The Corsican people are famously intrepid, once known for their vendettas - bloody family feuds - and their mastery of the craft of knifemaking. From these people, this land and ancient Roman, Greek and Etruscan roots arose distinctly regional wines.

These wines came under threat during the 1960s and ’70s, when some 17,000 French rapatriés - French colonists fleeing a newly liberated Algeria - arrived on the island and secured government land grants that enabled industrial-scale viticulture, quadrupling vineyard acreage while tarnishing Corsica’s reputation.

In August 1975, a group of Corsican growers and activists, armed with hunting rifles, seized a rapatrié-owned cellar in Aléria. The standoff spurred support for the riacquistu, a Corsican movement to reclaim heritage through language, song... and viticulture.