You can't go wrong with Picpoul de Pinet

A look at a wine that never disappoints.

The area around the Étang de Thau basin does not look like a classic wine country. It’s completely flat for a start, with none of the dramatic schist hills that you find higher up in the Languedoc. There are beaches, some rather seedy resorts mingled with attractive old fishing towns. Everywhere you go there are signs for ‘huîtres à vendre’ - this part of France produces about ten per cent of the country’s oysters. But these unpromising plains are also home to one of France's great wine success stories of recent years, Picpoul de Pinet. A wine that fits so perfectly into its landscape and the local cuisine, it seems it’s been there forever.

Picpoul country. Photo credit Domaine de la Grangette

I visited the region this time last year as a guest of Gérard Bertrand, the man who has done so much to raise the profile and price of wines from the Languedoc. We tasted dozens of  bottles in the searing heat of the Midi summer, many of them extremely expensive, like the £200 Clos du Temple rosé, but it was his humble Picpoul de Pinet, drunk not far from the sea with local oysters, that stole the show. 

Andrew Jefford in his recent collected writings, Drinking with the Valkyries, describes Picpoul as a ‘quiet wine’ and contrasts it with flashy attention-seeking ‘noisy wines’: “A quiet wine… will have an inner shapeliness, grace, logic, and purity of its own, and it will compel and reward attention via its drinking qualities.” That’s Picpoul.

Jefford and I are not alone in our love for Picpoul de Pinet - the British drink around half the annual production. And yet this wine was completely unknown over here 20 years ago. My late aunt used to have a house in Pomerols in the heart of Picpoul country, and she’d load up her car with wine from Domaine de la Grangette and bring cases of the stuff back to England. Wine merchant Jason Yapp remembers first trying the wines of Domaine Gaujal in 2004 and immediately securing an allocation to import to the UK. He told me: “It’s a pity one can’t get a commission on helping an appéllation gain popularity.

Originally the vineyards around Pinet would have been planted with grapes to go into Noilly Prat vermouth. Not just Piquepoul (for some reason the grape on its own is spelt differently to the appellation) but also Terret and Clairette. When the Cave d L’Ormaine co-op was set up in the 1920s, its entire production went into Noilly Prat. 

Then, in the 1970s and ‘80s,  “the bottom fell out of the vermouth market”, as Rosemary George, author of The Wines of the Languedoc, puts it. The reason? Investment in modern winemaking by the co-ops and some private producers like Domaine Gaujal. It was a very New World formula of temperature-controlled fermentation, mechanical harvesting, selected yeasts and reductive wine making that brought out the hitherto hidden majesty of the Piquepoul grape. George dates the big change to when Picpoul de Pinet, previously a VDQS (Vin délimité de qualité supérieure, one below AOC) became an AOC under Coteaux du Languedoc in 1985.

It wasn’t an overnight success but between 2005 and 2010, Picpoul de Pinet became a fixture in the UK, first on wine merchants’ lists and then in supermarkets (Tesco has listed a wine from Cave de Pomerols since 2009);  Picpoul was awarded its own appellation in 2013. The key to this success is consistency -  you know what you’re getting and quality levels are high, and a strong image - that distinctive ‘Neptune’ bottle and the wine’s uncanny affinity with oysters. 

As you can imagine, local producers are wary of tinkering with such a winning formula. There’s no move towards single vineyard bottlings or special parcels. But there is now a premium category called ‘Patience’, the wines left longer on the lees and designed to have ageing potential and appeal to Michelin-starred restaurants. They come in special brown bottles and can only gain the designation by passing a blind tasting by peers. This category was introduced in 2018 and seems to yet to have fully taken off though I tasted a fine example from Cave de Florensac earlier this year which is stocked by Wickham wines. It offers that distinctive picpoul character but with creamy round texture.

While a little lees ageing definitely suits Picpoul, I have tasted oaked and even sparkling versions which were not so successful. What surely has a future, however, is Piquepoul’s red cousin Piquepoul Noir  which Grangette makes into a very light red wine and a delicious rosé. Foncalieu also make an example which is available in Britain but I haven’t tasted it yet. At the moment plantings are very small but as the rosé boom shows no sign of abating this is definitely one to watch.. 

But I find ordinary Picpoul de Pinet impossible to resist, that squeeze of grapefruit, the saline tang like licking an oyster shell and just a little weight on the end. As Jefford writes: “After that it’s the place that comes tumbling out: sunlight, fresh white, quiet music, a sea interlude.”

A shorter version of this article appeared in Vinosity.