Carignan

Carignan is a Spanish grape that France planted in enormous quantity and then spent forty years pulling out. It comes from Cariñena in Aragon, where it is cariñena or mazuelo, and it is a minor blending grape in Rioja. Its real career was in the Languedoc, where it once covered more ground than any other red variety in France.

It ripens very late and needs real heat, and on flat irrigated land it gives a huge crop of thin, sharp, bitter wine. That is what most of it was. The European Union paid growers to remove it through the 1980s and 1990s, and French plantings fell by about three quarters. What survived the pull-out was largely the material nobody could bring themselves to destroy: old bush vines on poor hillside schist.

Those old vines are why the grape is interesting again. Fruit from low-yielding sixty-year-old carignan is dark, firm, high in acid and tannin, with black fruit, dried herbs and a stony bite. Priorat, Montsant, Corbières and Faugeres all sell it on its own name now, and Chile has a small movement built on dry-farmed vines planted in Maule after the 1939 earthquake.