A splendidly textured wine from a southern grape usually known for making red-fruited rosé. Here it delivers a deep hue, scents of raspberry jelly, and a supple, perfumed palate, all ripe red berries with rhubarb, clove and cinnamon. Soft enough to enjoy on its own, yet with enough stuffing to accompany food as well. Now-2012

Product Code: FAL109

Yves Falmet is a first generation vigneron. He has created his own wine estate the hard way: having studied bio-chemistry, he has worked in wineries all over the world - from his home region of Champagne (where he grew up on a mixed farm) to Germany, California and New Zealand. He then took out a large loan, and in 1996 bought 20 hectares of north-facing vineyards in the Languedoc, some of which had been abandoned by the previous owner, and shunned by neighbours. He added a tiny cellar in nearby Creissan in 2001. On his limestone-crested slope, it’s tough labour.  But Yves saw the potential of site and the old vines and is making splendid, fairly priced wines. Interestingly he chooses not to go organic, as he prefers spraying only twice a year with fungicides against oidium, rather than spray much more often with the copper and sulphur permitted by organic practice.

His Saint-Chinian is a blend of 40% Mourvèdre, 30% Grenache and 30% Syrah, unoaked, from vines averaging sixty years of age. He calls it L’Ivresse des Cîmes, which is a nice pun: you could translate it literally as drunkenness of the peaks, but in French it really means mountain sickness, suitable as the grapes come from a very steep vineyard near the ridge, on calcareous soils.