Last night we tried two very different St-Chinian's here, both of which were lovely, but in different ways. Forgive my newbie wine-tasting lingo; I don't have the experience you folks do, but I thought you'd appreciate hearing about a couple of wines you may not know.
Right outside of St-Chinian is a small producer called Mas Champart (10 hectares). We brought home a few of their bottles, but by far their best is the 2005 Clos de la Simonette, a 70/30 Mourvedre Grenache mix. It's a very dark, meaty wine with a great, heady bouquet. Heavy, stewed fruits, but not cloying, with hints of prune and cherry. We drank it with duck breast, but partway through all I wanted was filet mignon, with which it would have been absolutely perfect. We were told at the domaine that the wine could be put down to 2012 and the second bottle we got I won't open until at least 2010, with high hopes.
The second wine is one we read about in Jefford's The New France, a 100% Carignan made by a maverick vintner names Jean-Marie Rimbert. His domaine is hidden in the hills north of St-Chinean in a tiny hamlet called Berlou. It took us 45 minutes to drive the 20km off the main road to get there, but it was worth the drive.
He's busy making some wonderful wines as well as some very silly wines, and for a guy as serious about winemaking as this man is, he doesn't have an ounce of pretention about him. (His estate wine is called "Mas au Schiste"). We tried his Chant de Marjolaine, which Jeffords goes into paroxyms over, but it wasn't much more than a decent table wine. What we were really interested in is a wine he calls Carignator II, (the I being all gone) a 100% Carignan made up of five millisimes: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005. The 2004, he told us, went off to become rubbing alcohol.
The Carignator II can give some of the big Californian pinots I've had a run for their money, even though there's not a single drop of pinot here. Like I say, I'm a layman among you, and I lack the full spectrum of descriptive powers, but this wine had such wonderful depth and different layers of it revealed themselves after the first swallow. There are strong earth tones, dark fruit, hearthfire. A little bitter, but only in that way where there is a touch of resistance on the tongue before something darkly delicious emerges out of it. Something autumnal here as well, the bouquet of newly fallen leaves. Anyway, it floored me. I asked him if it could be put down and he said "j'aime le boire maintenant." I guess he's thinking of the next version of Carignator, but I bought a few of these and aim to find out what they're like down the road ...