Old grapes with a new lease of life

makers of recipe-based drinks such as gin or beer, wine producers can’t simply change what they do overnight. They only get one crop a year. And if they plant a different grape variety – always assuming the local climate (or wine law) allows them to – the vine takes years to bear a quality crop. What they can do, however, is reappraise what they’ve already got, which is what vignerons all over the world have been doing with cinsault, a red grape variety that has, in the past five years, gone from undervalued makeweight to cult hero in southern France (its original home), South Africa, Chile and California. Domaine des Trinités makes a superb example of a wine grape to watch in 2018: perfumed, spicy, satin-textured, utterly alluring.