Single Barrel Carignan 2023
- Retail
- £35.00
- Member
- £28.00
- Case
- £210.00
- Case (Member)
- £168.00
- Varieties
- Carignan
- Vintage
- 2022
- Country
- France
- Region
- Roussillon
- Alcohol
- 14.5%
- Bottle Size
- 750ml
- Drinking Window
- 2025 - 2032
- Description
From time to time a barrel of wine is so good that it seems a terrible shame to blend it away. So we have bottled barrel 36 as a great example of a pure Maury Carignan.
Only 650 bottles made
- Eyes
- A deep red/black
- Nose
- A complex, intriguing, earthy and autumn-fruited nose redolent of the forest floor. Subtle and incredibly more-ish.
- Mouth
- Carignan is often called 'rustic', as the tannins can be a little rough-and-ready (think Mellors the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover) But this barrel containing the free run juice and very light pressings of Carignan has a wonderful texture of bramble fruit and forest floor earthiness. Another beautiful wine from this fine Pyrenean grape.
- Body
- full
- Winemaking notes
- Once in a while a barrel comes along that us so exceptional that it seems a shame to lose it in a bigger blend. This Carignan comes from one such barrel. We harvested a couple of Tonnes of Carignan from our 1 hectare 80-year-old vineyard at La Roque, and gently fermented the grapes in a steel tank and several open barrels. We then drained the free run directly into barrels, and then loaded the press with the skins and started pressing gently. The first press wine is often the best. containing the wine trapped inside each grape, the wine near the skin, where much of the flavour comes from. We drained this dense, flavour-packed wine into a single 500L new oak demi-muid (Barrel 36)
- Growing Conditions
- After a second dry summer, with a dry winter in between, the lack of water in the region is turning into a crisis, and the vines struggled to flower and ripen a normal sized crop. The heat, and shortage of water resulted in a lower yield of smaller-sized grapes, with plenty of ripeness and flavour. Our La Roque Carignan vineyard managed a moderate yield in 2023, but resulted in a wine with exceptional concentration and texture.