Calitor

Identity

Calitor is a variety an appellation is retiring, legally and to a fixed date.

The Côtes de Provence specification cites it as an accessory variety, but only on plots planted before 31 July 1994. No new planting can claim it. The existing vines will live out their lives, and the variety will go with them.

That is a sunset clause, and it deserves reading for what it is.

The exact opposite of what other texts do

This corpus has documented several acts of conservation written into law. Jurançon keeps Camaralet de Lasseube and Lauzet, of which a dozen clones each remain. Palette names twenty-four varieties where its neighbours name twelve. Vin de Savoie keeps Mondeuse Blanche as a principal variety though only a few hectares are left.

Côtes de Provence does the reverse with Calitor: it buries it with a date.

A cahier des charges, then, is not only an inventory of what a region refuses to lose. It is also, sometimes, the instrument by which it decides what to let go.

Why, probably

The entry does not settle it, but the structure of the wine is eloquent: low acidity, no tannin, light body. Bottom of the scale on three axes.

Pl@ntGrape calls it "fertile and productive", and it "resists very well" certain problems. A generous variety giving pale, soft reds: that is exactly the profile a century of quality-seeking condemned, and the Var did not want it.

It buds late and ripens late, which might have earned it a reprieve in a warming climate. The 1994 date precedes that debate.

In the glass

Little colour, little tannin, little acidity. This entry's single descriptor is a reading of that light register, not a quotation.

There is, in the sources consulted, no description of a pure Calitor wine. We do not really know what is being lost.

Where it is named

At Côtes de Provence, an accessory variety, under the reservation that makes this entry worth writing.

What this entry does not say

Its parentage, undocumented. The area still planted, which no source opened here gives. And whether it survives elsewhere, outside appellations or in a conservatory — the question that would decide its survival, and one this page cannot settle.