In 2002, Daniel Illsley exchanged a life in theatre for a career in wine. He founded the small chain of wine shops Theatre of Wine, and set up an import business to supply restaurants. He has been wine director of acclaimed restaurant Maison François in London’s St James’s since it opened in 2020, winning Wine List of the Year at the National Restaurant Awards in 2023. Daniel is currently writing about his adventures in wine.
There was never a man so notoriously abused,’ protests Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and it seems to me that Cariñena, aka Carignan, could argue the same case. It’s still all too easy to discern the wild reek of a carbonic Carignan in a Languedoc blend, but fortunes are changing for the grape once seen as the ugly sister to Grenache and Syrah. And not before time. At its best it has a profile of dark berries, forest balsam, smoke and spice, with vibrant acidity and a smudge of sooty tannins.
Cariñena is its true name, a nod to its supposed origins in Aragón, but it appears under many synonyms, a sign of its proliferation in the world of wine. Its natural home is in hot climates, so it grows in abundance along the Mediterranean coast from Catalonia to the Rhône. Spanish colonists took it to Sardinia, and its notoriety for high yields and resistance to drought spread from north Africa to the Levant, and even central California; anywhere cheap jug wine was needed.
