From an email sent by
"The Neyers 2015 Carignan ‘Evangelho’, and Some Thoughts on Maxime Magnon
"My life with Kermit Lynch has been intertwined with scores of talented winemakers from France and Italy. At a tasting recently, I was asked to name one producer that in my mind stood out from the rest. It’s an impossible task – like naming a favorite wine, perhaps, or selecting a favorite child – but I confess to hesitating briefly when I thought of Maxime Magnon. Maxime lives, grows grapes and makes wine in Corbières – Villeneuve les Corbières to be exact – and he farms nine parcels of very old Carignan vines in these rugged hills overlooking Perpignan, 15-20 km inland from the Mediterranean. He farms organically, without a tractor, using instead the farm animals he raises on the property. His vines range in age from 60 years to well over 100 years, and the three separate bottlings he produces are simply ethereal, wines of great complexity and finesse, loaded with flavor. They go down so easily you can think only of silk.
"Tadeo, Barbara and I spent a lovely spring day with Maxime a few years ago, exploring his vineyards, tasting his wines, and finishing up with an al fresco lunch that he cooked in the vineyards over vine trunks that had been pulled out the preceding winter. On the way up to the top of the hill in his mud-spattered old Range Rover, we stopped at his local bakery to pick up a few baguettes, then he ran into the cellar to draw off a couple of bottles of his homemade olive oil and grab a few bottles of wine. By the time we arrived at his lunch site, the fire had been burning for a half-hour or so and was ready for the first course, grilled Calamari that had been marinating in olive oil, garlic and his personal wine vinegar. The next course was grilled brisket of veal from one of Maxime’s fall calves. ‘This one did not mind,’ Maxime told us, turning the strips of veal over the red-hot coals. ‘He ran away, so now we eat him.’ He was delicious too, especially accompanied by a slice of grilled baguette dipped in olive oil. To this day, I look at this meal as one of the best I’ve ever been served in France.
"Carignan is the second* most-widely planted red grape in California, and a few weeks after our return, Tadeo called me to say that he had found a Carignan vineyard in Oakley, in the northeast corner of Contra Costa County. The vines were own-rooted (not grafted on to Phylloxera-resistant rootstock) and thought to be more than 130 years old. The grower, Tadeo told me, would love to sell them to us.
"Tadeo makes this wine traditionally, crushing the grapes by foot over a period of a month or so while they ferment using the native yeast collected on their skins during the ripening.
"The finished wine is soft, aromatic, complex and silky, and I don’t mind saying that the 2015 Carignan from the Evangelho vineyard is one of the most important successes ever at Neyers Vineyards. We still have some available for purchase. Now if we can just find a disobedient calf.
- Bruce Neyers"
- I don’t believe that this is true, but I leave that for more knowledgeable folks.
