As a village, Saint-Chinian produces two categories of wine. The first originates from a vast expanse of conventionally farmed, machine harvested, flat clay vineyards in the southern part of the region. These wines are mass produced, opaque, clumsily alcoholic and overwhelmingly fruit driven. But please be aware that this is not true Saint-Chinian. For that you must travel to a cluster of small hillside vineyards which hug the village’s northern border. Here, a community of producers are bottling authentic and deeply soulful wine. These higher elevation hillside vineyards are not composed of “soil” so much as a crumbling blanket of sharp daggers made of pure, dark schist. One look at
Yannick Pelletier’s vineyard, and I can tell you that nobody is farming these vines in flip-flops! This treacherous terrain forces root systems to dig deep down into the earth to find nutrients and water. And in doing so, the vines capture incredible depth and minerality. This is the secret of authentic Saint-Chinian.
Yannick Pelletier is still a young man, but he already has an impressive 12 vintages under his belt. Before settling here, Pelletier studied and worked under the great master Léon Barral, 40 minutes northeast in the village of Faugères. Under the wisdom and tutelage of Barral, Pelletier learned the importance of organic farming, avoiding chemicals—he doesn’t even add sulfites to his wines—and most importantly, hand labor. Yannick avoids mechanization whenever possible and feels that hand farming improves focus in the vineyard and ultimately, the quality of the wine. He says the unusually small size of his property, “would allow me to mechanize all the work and not employ anybody. If I did this, however, the wine wouldn't be made as well and wouldn't taste the same. You need one person for pruning, two people for de-budding, six for the harvest and four to sort the grapes, not to mention the occasional help of friends and family.
In the cellar, Yannick employs a similarly minimal approach—although his work always remains improvised and tailored to respond to Saint-Chinian’s often dramatic climate shifts from vintage to vintage. Pelletier says, “There are no rules; just instinct. I function heavily on instinct and taste, from choosing when to harvest right down to bottling. I make wines with the grapes, terroirs and the weather of that year.” In 2012, that meant fermenting this gorgeous l'Engoulevent” cuvée in cement vats, avoiding oak altogether,and keeping the 30% of blend from Carignan all in whole clusters so that grapes could undergo natural intracellular fermentation. In what might have otherwise been an overpowering wine in 2012, this technique imparts pronounced freshness and softens acidity. The result is an impressively graceful and balanced wine.
Normally I begin this last paragraph with a description of the wine’s appearance, but today I can’t resist skipping ahead to the star of the show, its gorgeous and explosive aromatic pallet. Blackberries, huckleberries, wild sage, thyme and lavender, cured olives, turkish coffee, grilled sausage and cured meat come bellowing out of the glass as soon as this wine is opened. This cuvée has never seen the addition of sulfites so it remains untouched while truly alive and full of freshness and energy. Though the absence of sulfites makes for challenging and often more expensive shipping and storage of wine, when one enjoys a bottle this delicious we are reminded that the extra effort is more than worthwhile. There is a mouthwatering freshness, a vividness and electricity to the fruit and a distinct three dimensional quality that simply cannot be achieved with conventional, additive and sulfite-intensive winemaking. The flipside of that same coin is that this wine is more fragile than most other wines in the market. Please keep it stored properly and away from direct sunlight, and make a point of enjoying these bottles over the next 2-3 years. Along those same lines, this is not a wine for solemn contemplation or any sort of seriousness—it is joy and celebration in a bottle, and a reminder to live life in the moment! I encourage you to briefly decant the bottle, pour it into simple all-purpose stemware and share it alongside a platter of grilled sausages at a table of close friends.
