2012 Domaine Les Aurelles Solen Pezenas

Basile Saint-Germain worked two years at Château Latour, then seven years in Cognac, then walked away from both and bought ten hectares near Pézenas in 1995. La Revue du Vin de France now gives Les Aurelles three stars. In the entire Languedoc, only Mas Jullien and Peyre Rose hold the same rating.

Solen is 60 percent old-vine Carignan and 40 percent Grenache. The vines sit on Villafranchian gravel terraces ten to fifteen meters deep, scattered with basalt scree, thirty kilometers from the Mediterranean. Yields run 20 hectoliters per hectare. Every bunch is picked and sorted by hand. Saint-Germain banned synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides in 1995, and Excell now certifies the wine free of any trace of pesticide or phthalate.

No oak ever touches this wine. The 2012 spent 48 months in enamelled vats before bottling. Four years of neutral aging keeps the fruit intact and files down the hard edges Carignan is famous for.

That was fourteen years ago. There are no edges left. What is in the bottle now is silk, savory Mediterranean depth, and mineral tension that most Languedoc reds never develop.

If you drink mature Châteauneuf-du-Pape, this is the same pleasure with more tension and half the price.

Mature Languedoc at this level almost never reaches the market. This is the only parcel in the country.