Louis Latour Grande Ardèche Chardonnay, IGP Ardèche, France 2018 (£13.99, or £11.99 as part of a mixed case Louis Latour Agencies) In what was a fine example of a humblebrag avant le lettre, Charles de Gaulle once asked, “How can you goven a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” He could equally well have made his point with wine: France has more than 350 wine regions with a protected Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée or Protected Designation of Origin and a further 70 in the looser, broader Protected Geographical Indication. That’s enough AOCs to try one a day for a year with a couple of weeks off for good behaviour, before making a start on the PGIs for a couple of months. So it’s not surprising that many French wine regions are destined for obscurity. Still, the lesser-known names have their share of good wines, and often at a better price than more glamorous addresses: Louis Latour’s chardonnay from the Ardèche, for example, is stylish, balanced and comparable to wines from the producer’s home in swanky Burgundy.
Mas des Brousses Chasseur des Brousses, Saint-Guilhem-le Désert IGP, France 2018 (£12.95, stonevine.co.uk) The vineyards around the Puy de Dôme volcano in the Auvergne in the Massif Central were an important part of France’s vast everyday wine production a couple of centuries ago. These days, the Auvergne’s most noted puy product is the region’s vegan caviar (aka puy lentils). But I’m a big fan of the wines made by the local wine co-operative from their vines grown on largely volcanic soils. There’s something of Beaujolais, perhaps a hint of Burgundy, in the slinky Cave St Verny Pinot Noir, IGP Puy de Dôme, France 2018 (from £9.50, thewinesociety.com; leaandsandeman.co.uk; theatreofwine.com), a really characterful combination of juicy red berries with a sappy, thirst-quenching quality. From more familiar wine country down in Languedoc’s Hérault department, the Saint-Guilhem-le Désert IGP is no less obscure to most British drinkers. But Chasseur des Brousses is a wonderfully light (12.5%), fragrant, and spicy red mix of Bordeaux and Rhône varieties.
Les Vignes Retrouvées, Saint Mont, France 2018 (£8.95, thewinesociety.com) Bordeaux hogs the limelight in South West France. But if you come inland from the Gironde, there’s a patchwork of too-often overlooked vineyards producing, between them, some of France’s most distinctive, even eccentric, and hugely diverse wines, often made from local grape varieties that you just don’t find elsewhere. One example is the Saint-Mont appellation of Gascony, which used to be part of the engine room for the Armagnac industry, until sales of the Gascon brandy began to nosedive in the 1970s. These days the vines have been revived and repurposed, led by the local co-operative, Plaimont, which is behind some superb-value wines both red and white. Among my favourites from a recent tasting of a batch of Plaimont wines, Les Vignes Retrouvées is made from a trio of “rediscovered” white varieties – gros manseng, petit corbu and arufiac – that between them make a dry white of Lilt-like tropical-fruited fleshiness and grapefruit tanginess.
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