Campagne de Centeilles

Technical data

1 - Grape varieties : 80 to 95% of 40-year old Cinsault: average yields of 40hl/ha; grapes are picked at alcoholic degrees over or equal to 13°.5, and, for a large proportion, up to 14° G.L
2 - Vinification : Complete detemming, fermentation in open vats, frquent "pigeages" during the entire fermenting period, with a total maceration time of six weeks, the press juice reincorporated into the free-run wine.
3 - Maturation : 12 to 18 months in enamelled steel tanks (wood is particularly avoided for this cuvée).

About the Campagne....

- Enigmatically, years after years, this cuvée presents a strange quality: the wines is lean, liely and vigorous to start with, becoming full and fleshy as it ages in the bottle. Vertical tastings are very instructive in this matter: if one had not known previous vintages, as they showed 6 months after nottling, one might think, on tasting the most recent cuvées shortly after bottling, that the concentration of the grapes diminishes with each vintage! one has to conclude, therefore, that the wine "fills out" as the years go by.
- Furthemore, the vinification could almost be considered to be of little importance in this type of wine, which acquires the main part of its substance from the conditions of development of such a difficult grape variety as the cinsault, which is vulnerable to all diseases, and in particular grey rot.
- the specific terroir conditions for this grape variety are so difficult and limited, that everyone ended up resigning themselves to making rosé wines or light reds. But Centeilles remains the first wine estate to make red wines for laying down from this varietal, the production of which is regular year after year. However, emulations are gradualy appearing: other producers are discovering Cinsault. We find this somewhat satisfying.

Personality

- A clear ruby robe of meduim intensity
- an attractive aroma of young wine which is disconcerting because it is neither amylic more acidic
- Taste it: no it is not a Côtes-du-Rhône from the right bank. Yet, how reminiscent of the wines sometimes produced near Laudun or Lirac it is! With its fruits and spices, this wine is all mellowness and voluptuousness in which tannins, alcohol and aroas melt together.

Here is a wine which does not get its softness from some technology but simply from most elementary process of nature: a well-exposed ripens its grapes with no trouble... and gives us a wine which is not in the least intellectual, but simple, straighforward and attractive. In short, a wine for those who likes wines more than concepts.

This cuvée has only one flaw: being so easy to drink, at a first superficial examination the drinker is rather inclined to think that it could hardly go on beyond "the life of a rose, within the space of a morning". However delicious the cuvée Campagne might have been, that we happened to be appreciating at a given time, we have ourselves often given way to that feeling of ingratitude. In our foolish attachment to the perennial nature of things, we thought at that moment that our pleasure would be that much greater if this wine could be kept and improve even more with time. We also believed for a long time that softness rhymed with fragility.. Twelve vintages later, we own up to having lacked faith.