Wine & Spirits - June 2017 - 36

duce prodigious amounts of juice. In a region still
reeling from the after-effects of phylloxera and the
war, cinsault was a boon, easy to grow and readily bulked up with darker Algerian juice. The Midi
thrived on producing billions of liters of workingclass red wine, until Algeria gained its independence
in 1962. Left with tons of wan cinsault and carignan,
many locals blamed the grapes and turned to syrah.
Yet, treated with care, Fadat says, cinsault is the
Languedoc's "other very great grape" next to carignan. His plot, which he purchased from two old
vignerons who farmed it carefully, sits on a hillside
of marl and limestone. "The wine ages well when you
respect the yield and when it comes from rocky terroir," he says. "And the weather has to be warm and
dry ten days before the harvest because cinsault is
fragile, thanks to the thin skins."
Grown well, Fadat finds cinsault comparable to
pinot noir in its elegance and ability to transmit a
sense of the site where it's grown. Fadat is in Montpeyroux, the northernmost extent of the Languedoc,
where the vineyards climb up toward Larzac, a limestone plateau just south of the Massif Central. While
the sea is in the distance and garrigue perfumes the
air, it's considerably cooler here than more coastal
appellations, and prone to thunderstorms. He bottles the fruit from Les Servières, his 100-year-old cinsault vineyard, on its own, treating it like his other
reds, with long maceration and aging in barrel. The
result is unmistakably cinsault in its silky texture and
mouthwateringly bright red fruit, but gains a darker
mineral sense that grows as the wine takes on air. "It
has more elegance and digestibility than other bodybuilding wines," Fadat says.
36

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2017

Gathering up all the cinsault wines I can find,
I notice a similarity not between where they are
grown as much as in who makes them. There's Olivier Cohen, a young guy who used to run La Part des
Anges, a natural wine bar; and Régis Pichon, who
ran the wine cellars at La Tour d'Argent and at the
gourmet store Hédiard before leaving Paris for the
vineyards. There's Jean-Marie Rimbert, a Provençal
interloper in St-Chinian whose pig-and-chicken wine
labels suggest a direct link between wine and food. All
of them are outsiders who are working in the "nat-

photo of Sylvain Fadat courtesy of Domaine D'Aupilhac

"Cinsault has
more elegance and
digestibility than
other bodybuilding
wines."
-Sylvain Fadat

Fadat's reference to pinot
noir gains more weight when I
talk to Anne Gros, who started
making wine in Minervois
with her husband, Jean-Paul
Tollot, in 2007. Both Burgundy
vintners-Gros in VosneRomanée; Tollot at TollotBeaut in Chorey-lès-Beaune-
they had no preconceived
notions of the region's grapes
when they arrived; they were
simply looking for a chance to
make wine together. "At first,
we had no idea about what
it was or could be," she says
about the parcel of 50-yearold cinsault vines they found
on the property. But it didn't
take long for them to recognize
that cinsault could make good
wine. "It is quite close to pinot in its very ripe tannins,
medium body, color," she says of the grape. "It's also
very interesting: it reaches complete ripeness at 13,
13.5 degrees alcohol, and can go to 14 degrees without losing balance-not like grenache."
What was surprising was the difficulty in selling
it at first. "We blended it the four first years because
it was complicated to explain to the customers that
cinsault could be interesting as a [red] wine." Conditioned by the gallons of Provence rosé based on
cinsault, consumers, she found, assumed that was its
only good use.
By 2012, however, Gros and Tollot were ready to
force the issue, and began bottling CinsO, a superjuicy red with soft tannins and bright acidity. "We
believe in it not because it has ambitions of keeping twenty years, but because it is ambitious with
the pleasure of tasting and the possibilities to go
well with food," she says. Right now, that's good
enough for her-but, she adds, they've planted more
and on a different soil, to further explore cinsault's
possibilities.

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