[February 02, 2024]

This is my last Laithwaites letter. The job is passing to the next generation – they have a better sense of what’s going on around here and speak the new language of marketing … which is mostly acronyms. But writing in real English about wine, its people and places, is all I’ve ever done … for 60 years now (I wrote my first letter – six copies for my Dad’s friends – about working in the co-operative de Lussac in 1965).

However, I, as well as my psychiatrist, worry what will become of me if I stop. So, I won’t stop. I’ll just move. I’ve begged a regular page on our website … where you’ll still find me writing about wine, its people and places for as long as I’m coherent! So, switch channels now … over to ‘The Tony Letter’.

The New Tony Letter

Hello again. This is me carrying on my letters to you, 60 years later. In recent years, I’ve been increasingly told what to write and indeed that is still happening, but I can ignore them all now!

So what do I want to write today?

Long pause….

I’ve just opened a very nice bottle, so I’ll start with that and we’ll see where it takes us.

It’s called Charles Cros 2023 Syrah, a luscious red from the village of Fabrezan in the Corbières district of the Languedoc. Charles Cros is the village’s most famous son; a surreal poet and inventor. They named the village co-op winery after him and this, I reckon, is its best wine. His funny face is on the label. I really fell for the village’s unique style of wine way back in 1971, if I remember rightly. I shipped as much as my van would carry back to the old Railway Arch 36 in Windsor and found that customers went for it too. Luckily. It was my first big ‘hit’.

Why? What is it about this wine? It’s a dry red wine which has this apparent sweetness derived not from grapes, climate and soil, but from a special way of fermenting the bunches.

Fewer and fewer cellars use this special fermentation method because it takes time and requires bunches of grapes that are picked by hand, not machine (which pull the grapes off their stalks), and are still whole with the grape skins unbroken. The Charles Cros cooperative cellar in Fabrezan still has the special machinery that lifts whole bunches of grapes up to the top of the building and drops them gently, still whole, into vats. The vat has no air – specifically no oxygen – in it because it’s been filled up with carbon dioxide which is, as you know, heavier than air. CO2 is plentiful in wine cellars as fermenting vats give off loads. Just pipe it in. Without oxygen and with unbroken grapes, the yeasts on the bunches of grapes cannot easily ferment. More importantly, the vinegar-making bacteria cannot do their wicked work. So, the bunches just sit there … and something wonderful happens.

I’m not going to go all scientific – I’ve forgotten all of it anyway! – but basically the grape skins begin to soften … from the inside out. You’ve probably noticed this at home with old grapes left in your fruit bowl. Normally the grapes would eventually burst and the yeasts, or more likely bacteria, would get to the juice and produce vinegar. But in a CO2-filled vat that cannot happen. So, the bunches can sit for days … macerating quietly. Some juice eventually does leak out and normal fermentation begins. But the wine comes out differently … appealing and very delicious.

After the wine has been drawn off and the vat is opened at the bottom, it’s possible to pull out what appears to be whole bunches of grapes … but they are just skins, empty skins.

Fabrezan cellar had abandoned using this maceration carbonique* method because of the expense and loss of expertise, when two of its cleverest young members decided to withdraw from the cellar and start up in their old family cellar making wine the mac carb way.

They got some abuse and ridicule for this. That is until our buyer Mark Hoddy came across their wine at a local show and grabbed it all. We subsequently put out the story of Jean-Baptiste and Amelie Fabre’s brave breakout and masses of our customers backed them by buying a case and saying they’d keep on buying a case every year. An astonishing 3,000 of our customers now support the young couple annually.

The co-operative had a rapid rethink and put its mac carb machinery back in action. The Charles Cros red was the result. We bought it all. It was of course very popular. So, after a couple of years, they have now produced this super Réserve wine. 

Winemaker Benoît Fillaquier is now in charge at the Fabrezan cellar and was proud to bring back whole-grape fermentation to make this juicy, silky red.

Bigger, blacker, hugely flavoured, but still with that lightness and softness that lends it a delicious sweetness … when it isn’t at all. It ought to be a Corbières, but … well, you know France and bureaucracy…those bureaucrats love their wine so, for reasons best known to themselves, the wine authorities in Paris insist that single varietal wines cannot be called Corbières … and this wine is 100% Syrah.

So … we just call it a Haut Rive IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée) which is a tiny, 60-hectare appellation in the Fabrezan area without silly rules.

I love this wine; I am still loving it now on day three after opening. Do I prefer this to the Fabre’s wine? Might need to try more bottles before deciding! Give it a go.

*Mac Carb sounds like a new-fangled invention. In fact, it’s as old as the hills … and the hills are why it came about. In hilly areas like this – and Beaujolais where they do something similar – people built their little cellars on slopes, with one entrance at the top, another at the bottom, so it was easy for them to drop grapes in at the top and pull the wine and empty grapes out the bottom … as you can just see in a lovely painting by local artist Max Savy.