The weather is humid and not as warm any more. Living in Languedoc you benefit from more than 300 days of sunshine per year, but now it's been grey most of the time for a couple of weeks. Have to walk the dogs anyway, and sometimes the sun shines through the clouds and makes the vineyards look like they're on fire.

It feels like the right time to have a salmon filet with grilled potatoes for dinner. Herbes de Provence and sea salt from Camargue sprinkled over the potatoes of course. But why wait for dinner to try the wine to go with it? A glass of Delphine de Saint André 2008 from Domaine les Filles de Septembre.is the right remedy for the autumn blues.

This powerful wine is made from 70% syrah grapes, and 30% carignan from their half-century old carignan vines. A smart blend - the syrah providing spicyness and structure, and the carignan delivering it's lush, fruity taste, which is more rowdy and earthy than grenache,  the more common companion to syrah.

The wine has an incredibly full, lush, yummy taste, and a dense aroma on the nose. It has matured a year in oak barrels, but the oak is really well integrated. That's good, because I'm not a huge fan of apparent oak flavour in red wines.

If I would draw a parallell to the world of violins, this wine reminds me of a Lorenzo Storioni violin that belonged to a client I had many years ago. Even under the ear it had a velvety sound like an old leather armchair impregnated with tobacco and brandy. A character that I try to put a hint of into the violins and violas I make.
Mmm, nice scents coming from the oven...I'll write some more about this stuff another day...

Oh, and don't get fooled by the Servian emblem on the glass. The wine is produced by the nice Géraud family in the neighboring village Abeilhan, at least 2 km away (about a mile).
Les Filles de Septembre