Among the great injustices of French agriculture are the fates of great parcels of wine too small to realistically produce single bottlings. Before, great wines from small lots of just a few acres were most often blended back into lesser wines at the end of the year to make room for the incoming harvest. Recently, Les Vignobles Foncalieu obtained the right to declassify these wines into the appellation AOP Languedoc and blend them together to make lots big enough to produce one great wine. Though their provenance is from the more noble highland appellations, at least the dignity of these great wines is preserved by being separated out and blended together with other great lots. Thus Foncalieu decided to name this wine “Injuste” for exactly that reason. It contains some of their very best terroirs in St. Chinian and the Côteaux de Languedoc where highly extracted fruit from two distinct areas provide blending bases to create really great wines. All told, about 90% of the wine comes from the St. Chinian highlands where Syrah, Grenache and old vine Carignan are grown in separate lots from vineyards between Cazardarnes and Puisserguier. Here the soil is red, low in organic content, rich in iron, and mixed with hard limestone and some sandstone. The 600 feet of altitude here makes a difference: cooler nights leave the wines fresher and more aromatic. The remaining 10% of the wine comes from the terraces of the Côteaux de Languedoc appellation which abuts St. Chinian north of the village of Cazouls. Here the soils are slightly richer, composed of light brown clay and limestone. The vines here are subject to hotter temperatures that concentrate the berries and keep the yields down to about the same as in St. Chinian. The concentrated Grenache from a couple of small parcels here plays well with the fresh Grenache flavors from St. Chinian.
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2019: 89 WE, 2018: 88 W&S (Best Buy)