This week’s day-to-day wine for me is one from Great Wine Buys’ mixed case, a dense, peppery and slightly wild number from Minervois, an AOC in France’s Languedoc region (southern France). This wine is 60% carignan, a racy, gamy grape of the country wines of southern France and parts of Spain, which is often maligned for producing stinky plonk. But this d’Oupia is nice in that it fends off the powerful whomp of the carignan with 30% Syrah and some Grenache in there, too.

It tastes so much like black pepper-blackened steak it’s not even funny. It tastes like plum trees smell at the end of the summer–dank, warm and muddled.