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Kosher Wines -->
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Aramon or Aramon Noir is a variety of red wine grape grown
primarily in Languedoc-Roussillon in southern
France.
Between the late 19th century and
the 1960s, it was France's most grown grape variety, but plantings
of Aramon have been in continuous decline since the mid-20th
century. Aramon has also
been grown in Algeria and Argentina, but nowhere else did it ever
reach the popularity it used to have in the south of France.
It is most noted for its very high productivity, and yields can
reach levels as high as 400 hectolitres per hectare. The vine's
resistance to oidium, phylloxera, and powdery mildew lead to its
reputation as workhorse grape that could be relied on by growers
for dependable financial returns. |
2010 Rogov's Guide to Kosher Wines
The World's 500 Best Kosher Wines |
However, when cropped at high yields, the resultant wines are very
light red in colour (but show a blue-black tinge), low in alcohol
and extract and generally thin on character. Such Aramon wine is
often blended with wine from grapes of darker color such as
Alicante Bouschet and Grand Noir de la Calmette to darken the
resulting wine.
If planted on poor soils and pruned very severely to much smaller
yields, it has been shown to be able to give concentrated wines
with spicy, earthy, herbaceous, and somewhat rustic character.[3]
However, such Aramon wines are extremely rare, but some varietal
wine is still produced in Languedoc.
A viticultural drawback of Aramon is that it buds early and ripens
late, which means that it only is suitable for growing in hotter
regions, and that it is very sensitive to spring frost.
History
When the south of France - Le Midi - was connected by railways to
the more industrial and populous north of the country in the 19th
century, the cost of transporting wines and other goods decreased
considerably. Previously, waterways had provided the best
transportation routes for wine, and only more expensive wines had
been able to bear the cost of long overland transport. In the
resulting 19th century vineyard expansion of southern France,
Aramon became the grape variety of choice in Languedoc. As an
indication of the wine industry boom of the era, the vineyards of
the Hérault department (one part of Languedoc) more than doubled
between 1849 and 1869, when they covered a massive 214,000
hectares (530,000 acres).Thus, in this department alone, a
vineyard surface somewhat larger than that of the entire Bordeaux
region of today was added in 20 years, most of it planted with
Aramon.
The wine produced was undistinguished, but it was produced cheaply
and in huge quantities. The simple reds of Languedoc initially
competed with equally simple reds made closer to Paris, in areas
where most of the wine production disappeared in the early 20th
century due to the combined effect of competition and phylloxera.
Thus, the wines were not made in a mold that wine consumers of the
late 20th and early 21st century would have recognised as a
typical "warm climate" style, but rather outmatched other thin red
wines by means of sheer volume and lower production costs. Such
wines were primarily drunk as everyday table wine by French
workers, and they were known as petit rouge – small reds.
Since high-yielding Aramon gives one of the least coloured wines
that still pass as red, the practice of blending such wines with
wines from teinturier grapes such as Alicante Bouschet was a
measure used to give them a measure of increased credibility as
reds.
Later, Aramon-based light red wines got competition on the French
market from cheap red wines from North Africa, primarily from the
then-French colony of Algeria. Algerian wines, produced primarily
from Carignan, had more colour, alcohol and concentration than the
typical Languedoc wines of the era. Since these characteristics
were attractive to consumers, it became common in the 20th century
to blend cheap wines from the south of France with Algerian and
other North African wines.
These characters lead to a decreased popularity of Aramon in
France from the mid-20th century. This trend was reinforced when
the French vineyards were hit by frost in 1956 and 1963, which hit
the frost-sensitive Aramon particularly hard. Aramon was primarily
replaced with Carignan, which overtook Aramon as France's most
grown grape variety in the 1960s.[5]
In 2000, there remained 9,100 hectares (22,000 acres) of Aramon in
France, primarily in the Hérault, with a rapidly decreasing trend.
Origin and offspring
Despite its similarities to the hybrids Villard Noir and Couderc,
Aramon is not a hybrid but rather a Vitis vinifera. Some have
proposed that Aramon originated in Spain, but DNA typing has
revealed Gouais blanc to be one of its parents, with the other
parent so far unidentified.[6] This parentage is more typical of
French or Germanic varieties, but given its heat-demanding
viticultural characteristics, it is unlikely to have survived in
cultivation in a colder region. Therefore, its origin could very
well be southern France.
Aramon was used extensively by the early French hybridizers in
crosses with American grape species like Vitis rupestris and Vitis
aestivalis as a source of good viticultural characteristics, and
proved a better parent than many of the better known V. vinifera
cultivars. Its reputation for mediocre wine quality has however
haunted many of the resulting hybrids.
Aramon was also a parent of the ill-fated AxR1 rootstock, which is
"Aramon x Rupestris Ganzin No. 1". AxR1 caused much problems in
the Californian wine industry. |
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