Dear grapes, I'm so sorry

How wrong can you be? In my case, very wrong. The spinning wine world is one in which definitive judgments are misguided; yesterday's granite truths are ground down ceaselessly into today's sandy incertitudes. Take, for example, the intriguing case of that despised outcast of a grape variety, Carignan.

I once went so far as to write that I hated it. And I did: every time I tasted a wine in which Carignan played a major role, it tasted thin and sour, with the kind of raw, loping acidity which reminded me of soluble aspirins. There was often a bitter edge thrown in, too, like the final insult from an insufferable former friend with whom one has just fallen out definitively. It was not a grape variety, it seemed to me, which even wanted to be liked.

Matters were made worse by the fact that there was so much of it. No other grape variety is more widely planted in France; this was a legacy of the old days where quantity counted for much and quality for little. Carignan was a kind of rabbit among grapes; all its flowers had to do was look at each other and before you could say "Minervois" there would be bunches of dangling, pendulous black grapes clustered all over it like jewellery on a dictator's wife. It liked the southern sun, and ripened late.

The appellation authorities disliked it, too, and kept rewriting the rules in order to exclude more and more of it from the vats of the southern Rh?ne and Languedoc. It was also grown in Spain, Sardinia and the Americas, and didn't make much more of a shift there than it did down in the south of France. Its days seemed numbered. I rejoiced.

Idiotically. Most of the Carignan I had tasted (and, presumably, the French rulewriters too) had been based on wines which were, precisely, fermented from rabbit-fecund vines often grown in the wrong, flat-land location. The best (and craziest) growers knew that life was a bit more complicated than that. They knew that up in the hills there was Carignan which wasn't far off celebrating its 100th birthday. These vines had shy, panda-like reproductive abilities. By the end of a long, dry summer, their deep roots had rummaged through the rock fissures to which they clung and produced a small crop of sweet, tight little grapes. And the wine?

It was about this time last year when I finally recanted from my Carignan heresy. I was down in the Languedoc with a grower called Marc Valette, a man whose passion leads him to climb naked into his vats each autumn in order to foot-punch the living daylights out of his grapes. He'd done just that to a super-ripe Carignan which he called Gal?jades de Canet Valette and it had ended up at 14.5 per cent alcohol with around 20 grammes of sugar left in it which refused to ferment. It was chewy, lush, superb: the apotheosis of sweet, soft prunes. It clinched, as it were, the challenge thrown down a few days earlier by another Carignan dreamer, Jean-Marie Rambert up in St Chinian. "My pivot is Carignan," Rambert had told me, fiercely, before serving me what he claimed was "the greatest Carignan in the world". It was another 14.5 per cent monster called Le Chant de Marjolaine. Less prunes, on this first occasion, and more cherry; grown in the schist of St Chinian, too, had given it a saturated mineral quality which made it like drinking liquid rock. This pair sent my prejudices reeling.

I mention all this since a third work of Carignan genius has just come my way and, unlike the first two, you can actually go out and buy it with relative ease (though, being a small parcel, it won't last long). It comes from another outstanding Languedoc domain, Borie de Maurel in