" Erme de Centeilles"

THE "ERME DE CENTEILLES" VINTAGE

A ‘Grenache gris’, what for?

A lovely old ‘Grenache gris’ vine with twisted arms … Curiously pruned, using a technique half way between the goblet and the Royat cordon; rather as if our predecessors had hesitated a long time about it…

We did too (as the defenders of all slightly lost causes that we are!), we hesitated: in 1990, the ‘gris’ type of Grenache was getting rather bad press. What wine were we going to make with it? And then, what with this “mongrel” pruning, how many years would it take to restore the vine stock to a more or less standard shape? Let’s admit it, we even thought of getting rid of it altogether.

But every vine must have its guardian angel: in the end we gave it a reprieve! To make a sweet white wine of it.

What type of over-ripeness for a Minervois sweet white wine?

Too dry to allow noble rot to develop, the Mediterranean climate hardly permits a botrytis rate higher than 10 - 20% at the very most.

On the contrary, our windy regions are ideally situated for achieving concentration by withering: in the Pays d’Oc, the term we usually use is passerillage (in Occitan: passerilhar or panserilhar, from the Latin: pandere, pansi, pansum) and not of course vendange tardive – late harvesting – (or Spätlese in German), an expression which is only meaningful for Alsace or German-speaking winegrowers.

In short, between mid-November and mid-December, the saccharimetric concentration reaches a potential alcohol content of 19 to 23° … provided nothing goes wrong.

Vinum sine nomine? … Or how to become fair and marketable?

Up until 1985, the MINERVOIS appellation decree (VDQS) authorised the production of a sweet white wine: the MINERVOIS NOBLE.

Alas! At that time, when Minervois was “promoted” to AOC status, there wasn’t anybody left to lay claim to this production which, as a result, was excluded by the new decree. There began Minervois noble’s long descent into obscurity (will it ever manage to extricate itself?). In any case, the consequences of this absurd relegation are perfectly trivial:

1.It’s no longer a VDQS
2.It’s not (yet?) an AOC
3.It can’t be a simple ‘Vin de Table’ (too rich in potential alcohol) or a Vin de Pays (other standards).

In the end, without an ‘appellation’ or even a name, our outcast could easily have remained outlawed – and therefore unsaleable – if it hadn’t been for an abstruse (but salutary) European classification that has providentially classified it under the somewhat bucolic name: “partially fermented must made with grapes dried by over-maturation” (sic)

So that’s its administrative “name”, under which, by some strange metamorphosis, it becomes fair and marketable.

And what about the vintage’s given name?

A name (decidedly) is always a bit complicated. The Romans, ever-practical, had long ago tried to clarify the situation: nomen, praenomen, cognomen (surname, first name, nickname). But they didn’t have anything to say about the given names of wines that were to be born two thousand years later …

In Oc, an erme is an uncultivated place where plants grow spontaneously. But it is also an uninhabited wild place where hermits (from the Latin eremus, the desert) retreated: didn’t they say in the Middle Ages that Saint-Guilhem had “retreated to the desert” (hence the name of the village Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert)?

The hermits who lived in Centeilles were members of the Order of Saint Anthony – thaumaturges – who cured people of a terrible illness (ergotism or Saint Anthony’s fire) through prayer and thanks to an ointment made of pork fat and wine, sanctified by contact with relics of their patron saint.

The last hermit was buried at Notre Dame de Centeilles in 1630 and the hermitage where he lived after so many others had done, lies entangled under the brambles … Let the vintage created in their honour give us the strength to restore the building whose name (that again) does not have the right to appear on the label!