Aramon

Aramon was once the most planted grape in France, and it is now almost gone. Its rise came after phylloxera destroyed the vineyards of the Languedoc in the late nineteenth century. The replanting that followed was driven by volume for the industrial cities of the north, and Aramon delivered volume better than anything else available: on the fertile plain it could yield enormous crops per hectare, year after year.

What it produced was thin, pale and weak, often below nine degrees of alcohol, and it was routinely blended with dark, strong red shipped in from Algeria to make it saleable. That trade defined French everyday wine for the first half of the twentieth century, and it also created the vast surplus that European vine pull schemes later spent decades removing.

The pull schemes took Aramon first. Plantings fell from hundreds of thousands of hectares to a few thousand, and the Languedoc replanted with Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre. A small number of growers now keep old Aramon vines on poor hillside ground, where the yield is naturally low, and make a light, sharp, honest red from it as a matter of interest.