Aragonese by origin — the name remembers the town of Cariñena — Carignan became, for a time, France's most planted grape. On the irrigable plains of the Languedoc its enormous yields flooded Europe's wine lake with thin, dark ordinaire, and for decades it was the first target of every vine-pull scheme Brussels or Paris devised. Few grapes have been so thoroughly blamed for a crisis they did not design.
Redemption came from the vines the bulldozers missed. Old, dry-farmed, low-yielding bush vines — on Priorat's crumbling llicorella slate, in the hills of Corbières — showed that eighty-year-old carignan gives something else entirely: iron, garrigue, black raspberry and a saline grip. A cautionary tale and a resurrection in a single grape.