Cinsaut

Pinotage.

As you said, it's a cross, Pinot Noir, Cinsault.

So if you grow Pinot Noirs in the normal way, where you trellis it, five-wired trellises and so forth, the Cinsault parent becomes a dominant character in the vineyard, in the vine, which means it carries too many grapes.

So we decided if we plant Pinot Noirs, we're going to plant Pinot Noirs as bush vines, which automatically enforces a lower yield on that vineyard.

I said.

What's the, that ...

Um, Cinsaut is the one that's cherry.

Oh, Cinsaut is the one that's cherry.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Give me some on that.

[laughs] Good save on that one.

I was like Cinsaut was the one you said it's cherry.

And for, for instance, we have a Chenin Blanc that's planted in 1982.

Uh, we have a Semillon planted in 1936 that's 90 years old, and then we have a Cinsaut planted in 1974.

So really old vineyards that are showcasing great wine.

So Old Road's more about small parcel stories, uh, different vessels using concrete eggs, amphora clay pots, uh, French oak barrels.

Uh, and then the other sort of three reds we see a lot, Carignan, which was very widely planted all throughout the Languedoc, considered sort of less serious, uh, now.

But we also see, uh, Cinsaut and Carménère, and this sort of makes up the core of, like, basically the red wines and a lot of the rosé wine production that we see throughout this region.

There's also the white varieties, Grenache Blanc, Viognier, Marsanne, Roussanne, and Rolle, which we usually label as Vermentino in Australia.

You also see it as an Italian grape varietal.

And let's talk about this transformation, because it's pretty interesting.

In the 70s, Languedoc was dominated by things like Carignan, Aramon, and Cinsault.

They were making high-volume wines.

Their yields were really high, and these wines were not terribly interesting.

Uh, nobody...

Few people knew that Mourvèdre even existed in California, and of course nobody cared about Cinsaut, and they s- still don't, still don't care about Cinsaut.

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... and Sangiovese and Cinsault and Malbec, Tempranillo.

Uh, so some beautiful, um, varieties to, to work with and, um, but the, the, the site itself, it just...

You must get, like on a weekend, you must get like, like literally hundreds of people there because you've got quite a bit of capacity with different sections, and then there's a big grassed area and trees to sit under.

Or grenache.

Or Cinsault.

See, I would say in the, like on their own, I would do lighter, more sipper would be grenache, and as I go into a meal it would be more syrah.

Yeah.