The Defender of Carignan

Jean-Marie Rimbert, the self-proclaimed defender of the Languedoc’s native Carignan grape, is a benchmark grower for the region and also a maverick. As defender and champion of Carignan, his cuvées show just how pleasurable and vibrant this often maligned grape can be when planted on the right soils and farmed and vinified responsibly. He likes to say “Carignan is my Pinot” and it’s an apt comparison. With his low yields, intimate knowledge of his individual parcels, and low-intervention winemaking, he brings out undeniable delicacy, nuance, elegance, and age-ability in the grape. The wines are renowned for offering a pleasurable experience, more on the fruit and freshness than spice and power, a balance that Jean-Marie achieves by only gentle extraction of the grapes.

Jean-Marie was born at a mixed family farm in Provence and trained not as a winemaker, but as a general agriculturalist (“the vine is basically a small fruit tree, isn’t it?” he jokes). Even after 40 years of making wine, he still proudly calls himself a paysan – a peasant, man of the countryside, and his down-to-earth farmer side also shows in his philosophy. The estate’s vineyards have been managed organically since 2003 (certified 10 years later) – not primarily for the wine’s quality, he says, but rather because “I want to cultivate in a way that doesn’t damage the environment. I’m in it for the long term.”

He bought the estate in Berlou, a small village in the Saint Chinian area, back in 1996, and it was a rocky start thanks to the fact that his son Marceau was born at the beginning of the harvest, their very first at their own domaine. What he does know is that he was seduced by the village’s unique schist soils and steep slopes (so unique that they give the village the right to its own AOC, the Saint Chinian Villages Berlou). “I like the fine notes of dried rose petals that schist gives to wines,” he confirms, “and I insist on cultivating vines on the hillsides, as it yields wines that are more pleasurable, lower in alcohol, and easy to digest.

The secret of Jean-Marie’s wine is based on a very gentle extraction in the cellar that privileges finesse over body. The wines are then aged in tanks or old barrels, lightly fined, filtered, and lightly sulfured at bottling. Besides the wines made from the domaine’s own grapes, he also runs a négociant business making easy-going wines from purchased grapes farmed sustainably by nearby growers, hoping to convert them to organic in the near future. After all, he’s in it for the long term.

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