Cinsault has been growing in California since the late nineteenth century. The state has the oldest commercially producing Cinsault block in the world, planted in the 1880s. Most of it has been used in inexpensive blends for a hundred years. Only in the last decade has a small group of producers begun bottling Cinsault as a varietal and treating it as a wine worth attention.
Why the old vines matter
Vines forty to one hundred and forty years old produce small yields of intensely concentrated fruit with extraordinary depth. The wines are not big in the modern California sense; they are layered. The old-vine Cinsaults coming out of California are some of the most interesting wines in the state right now and almost no one is paying attention.
What Southern California adds
Local growers have been quietly planting new Cinsault blocks in the last decade, often on hillside sites with poor soil that force the vine to work harder. The new plantings will not reach the depth of the hundred-year-old blocks for thirty or forty years, but the wines being made from them now already have the kind of structure that points where the variety is going.
Tasting note
Brick-red in the glass, lighter than most California reds. Strawberry, raspberry, a soft note of dried herbs, and a tannin profile that reads as elegant rather than aggressive. The wine pours well at the table without intimidating the food. It is the kind of red that wins over a Pinot Noir drinker without trying to be Pinot.