Far too many southern French reds have been spoilt for me by that harsh, green, acrid smell of over-produced Carignan - and I have been sympathetic to the authorities' attempts to reduce the amount of Carignan planted in the Languedoc Roussillon.
For most of the second half of the 20th century, the productive Carignan
vine was the single most common vine variety in
With 6,000 acres planted, Carignane is still the tenth most planted red wine grape in
Corbières, Fitou, Faugères, St Chinian and Coteaux du Languedoc in favour of gentler, fruitier grapes such as Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Cinsault.
And yet, and yet. There are wines made almost exclusively from Carignan that are very impressive. Some of the most obvious are grown not in
After all, as its name suggests, Carignan is presumably Spanish in origin,
from around the town of Carineña due west of Priorat in the province of
Aragon, whose rulers at one time conquered much of the Mediterranean.
Cariñena is still grown in northern
still clinging to the precipitous slopes of Priorat. Wines such as Cims de
Porrera, Vall Llach and the new Clos Manyetes from René Barbier depend
almost exclusively on them.
This summer’s Carignan Renaissance event was held in an old wine cellar transformed into hip lighting manufacturer (sic transit…) just outside Beziers, organised by John Bojanowski, an American married to a Frenchwoman who makes Clos du Gravillas wines in St Jean de Minervois. He had been clever enough to realise that there is now a body of wine producers, many of them young and including Nicole Bojanowski, who are staking a substantial part of their future on the viability of Carignan. Hence the existence of www.carignans.com and this gathering of tasters from Spain, Paris, Japan, England and all over southern France.
We tasted 24 Carignans blind from the
For what it's worth, these are mine:
*Seriously old Carignan vines can produce concentrated, characterful wine if yields are not too high and the terroir is interesting. Many of my favourite wines came from Priorat where all these conditions apply - although these are not gentle wines. They are as tough as the terrain and tasting them can literally be like sucking a stone - truly terroir-driven wines.
*But this is dependent on the existence of ancient Carignan vines in the
right place - just as, for example, some not-especially-promising sites in
Contra Costa and
*Then there is the question of oak. Fadat, who has a particularly gentle hand as a winemaker, is adamant that Carignan and too much new oak are not a pretty combination. I agree with him and found one or two wines, including Roc des Anges ‘1903’ 2001 and Wild Hog 2001 Sonoma Carignane, just overwhelmed by the oak.
But this was hardly an impartial group. It was a bit like discussing the
existence of God at a prayer meeting. The discussion tended to revolve
around the lack of decent planting material and which rootstock suits
Carignan best rather than around the essential quality of Carignan as a
varietal, which was taken by most of the gathering as a given.
My main criticism of Carignan at its least successful is its combination of
high acidity and green, unripe flavours. And I'm afraid I found that
characteristic
in quite a number of this supposed crème de la crème of the Carignan
firmament (which for obvious reasons ignored the great underswell of
the French wine lake which is made up of a tide of sour Carignan).
Among non-European wines the Fairview Pegleg Carignan 2002 from
I am also sure that
For me
the finest French Carignans managed to avoid this characteristic -
presumably because the grapes ripened fully either because 2001 was
such a good vintage in the south of France and/or because of the age of
the vines and/or because of the terroir and/or because yields were low
enough (though Sylvain Fadat says 40 hectolitres per hectare is quite
low enough). His Le Carignan 2001 from Domaine d'Aupilhac was certainly
a model of restraint, the wine from the first flight I set on one side
for all subsequent wines to be measured against. And my very favourite
wine of all came from the Fitou
But perhaps this is to miss the point of Carignan. Perhaps it is meant to be a cussed brute, like the rocks that litter the
