Wine of the Week: Cairanne Boutinot Les Six

It’s Southern Rhone time with a look at a great Cairanne plus some budget alternatives for paid subscribers.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for drink writers. All the PRs have enormous budgets as there’s Christmas round-ups to be written. Furthermore the standard of samples goes up considerably from sub-£10 supermarket wines to fancy champagne and even vintage port. I am now extremely popular with the neighbours who are in my ‘free wine’ Whatsapp group. 

A couple of bottles turned up recently that just looked particularly expensive: beautiful labels, elegant bottles wrapped in tissue paper with heavier glass than normal but not too heavy. All round class. I know wine people aren’t meant to be influenced by this sort of thing. We pretend to be 100% focussed on the liquid but packaging is really important. They looked like at least £30 a bottle, probably more. I didn’t look at them particularly closely but eventually opened one this weekend. 

It came at a propitious moment having just tasted three wines from Washington State that while not unpleasant didn’t make me want to drink more than a small glass. A couple which shall remain nameless were a bit clumsy, a mixture of high alcohol and peculiar sweet, slightly confected flavours. And the prices!

In contrast the Cairanne from Boutinot just tasted right, savoury and herbal, like Boeuf Bourguignon in a glass. It’s very young, 2022, but already very drinkable. Perfect with roast loin of pork. This is what I wrote about it:

Bright purple red colour.
Herby nose, rosemary, thyme, dark fruit.
Savoury on the palate, black olives, a little leather, dark cherries, and herbs. Very smooth, ripe tannins, polished without being bland. Long. Carries its 14.5% really well. Good now but has lots of ageing potential.

Cairanne was until recently a Cotes-du-Rhone Villages but was promoted to cru status, the Premier League, in 2016 alongside Gigondas, Lirac etc. I drink a lot of Rhone wines and probably couldn’t recognise the difference between this and say a Gigondas but it was definitely of similar quality. 

The producer is an interesting one. Despite the French sounding name, Boutinot is a wine merchant based in Manchester which supplies a lot of independent shops. The firm first began making wine in Beaujolais and the Macon in 1990. They now have operations  in Gascony, the Languedoc and the Rhone valley. They also have a branch in South Africa since 1994 where they produce one of the great bargains of the wine world - Percheron Old Vine Cinsault. In 2017 they acquired Henners, an English sparkling wine producer. 

The Cairrane operation dates back to 2010 when Boutinot bought vines and opened a winery. The one I tasted was called ‘Les Six’, a blend of grenache, syrah, mourvedre, cinsault, counoise, and carignan. It was fermented and aged in giant oak casks so there was no obvious oaky taste. And while there's no shortage of character, there’s also one of the rusticity you sometimes get in the Southern Rhone - particularly Rasteau which can do some bizarre things when aged. I’d be very confident sticking this away for five years.

The most surprising thing about this wine is the price. The 2022 I tasted will cost you £16.25 from NY  Wines. I notice that the 2021 is available for even less - Aitkens lists it for £15.50 and  comes with the endorsement of Mr Rhone himself Matt Walls. 

For some people however, that is still at significant outlay. If you're looking for some more affordable Cairanne, I have two suggestions for paid subscribers plus a white wine.