Alicante Bouschet

Alicante Bouschet is a teinturier, one of the few varieties with red flesh as well as red skin. Almost every other red grape has clear juice and takes its colour from the skins during fermentation. Henri Bouschet bred it in 1866 by crossing petit Bouschet with grenache, and its purpose was straightforward: to add colour and body to pale, weak wine.

That made it enormously useful and enormously abused. It was planted across the Languedoc and North Africa to darken bulk wine, and in California it survived Prohibition because its tough skin shipped well to home winemakers on the east coast, who valued the deep colour when stretching a batch. It stains hands, presses and tanks, which is a fair signal of what it was for.

Portugal rescued its reputation. In the Alentejo it is grown for its own sake, with the yield held down, and gives a serious wine: dense, dark, fleshy, with black fruit and a firm finish. Spain grows it as garnacha tintorera, particularly in Almansa and Alicante, where old bush vines give something similarly convincing.