Clos Fantine Faugeres - natural goodness

2006 Faugeres tradition, Clos Fantine

“The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.” Robert McIver

We live in the comfort zone of zero defect, zero funk wines, a dull culture arbitrated by scientists, educators, journalists and standards panels. The spectrum of what is physically acceptable is a narrow one for correctness and is exalted above all else in the belief that a wine should be delivered to the consumer, the imaginary consumer, in a “marketable” condition.  Whatever that might mean. You might as well say that punk, free jazz or atonal music should be proscribed because they don’t confirm with the traditional perception of what are acceptable forms of music.  In time orthodoxy bends, if not yields, and recently we have seen a grudging (almost niggardly) critical acceptance of the fact of natural wines (those wines which are made with minimal interventions in the winery). The major opinion formers still, however, consider the majority of these wines to be faulty, dirty, spoiled, undrinkable, too weird, a fringe attraction enjoyed only by wine extremists. Without anarchy or extremism there is no energy, no life, and no movement and things only change in that they become more so.

I love wines that are wild. I was slightly worried when I saw that the Clos Fantine sported a hefty 14.5%, but as soon as I poked my nose in the glass I was transported to what Sybille Bedford described in Jigsaw as “the sun-baked, cicada-loud, ageless country of scrub and terraced hills… the archetypal Mediterranean landscape of rock & olive, wild thyme, vineyards, light”. This is a living wine, unfiltered, unfined and unsulphured; it captures the spirit of the terroir. The inviting bouquet displays roasted fruits supplemented by game-and-gravy aromas and familiar garrigue notes of bay, sweet rosemary and roasted thyme and a bonfire smokiness lurks in each sniff.  It is not heavy at all in the mouth, the heat communicated in flavour not in alcohol, and the texture is smooth and sweet with a wonderfully agreeable taste of confit fruits bolstered by herbal savouriness and marmite flavours.
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