Carignan

Carignan was for decades the most planted grape in France, and almost none of it was any good. Planted across the Languedoc for the bulk wine trade, it cropped enormously and produced thin, harsh, acidic wine, and successive European Union vine-pull schemes removed vast areas of it.

What was missed is that Carignan cropped hard on poor soil from old vines is a genuinely fine grape. The variety produces wine with deep colour, high acidity, substantial tannin and dark fruit — blackberry, black cherry, cranberry — with a savoury, mineral, faintly herbal character and a distinct note of dried herbs and tar.

Its rehabilitation has come from precisely the vineyards that were considered worthless: old bush vines on schist and limestone hillsides in Corbières, Faugères and Priorat, many of them fifty or a hundred years old, farmed without irrigation. Carbonic maceration, adopted widely in the Languedoc, also suits it, softening the tannins and lifting the fruit.

In Spain it is Cariñena — confusingly also the name of an unrelated appellation — and as Mazuelo it is a minor blending component in Rioja, valued for acidity and colour. In Priorat it shares the stage with Garnacha in wines of remarkable concentration.

Sardinia grows it as Carignano, with the old sandy-soil vineyards of Sulcis producing a notably softer and rounder style.

Chile and California both have significant old plantings that have attracted renewed attention.