Marsanne

Marsanne is the weightier half of the northern Rhône's white partnership, almost always found alongside Roussanne, and it is the grape that supplies body where Roussanne supplies aroma and acid.

It produces a full, broad, low-acid wine with quince, pear, melon and a distinctly nutty, waxy character — almond and marzipan in youth, moving towards honey, beeswax and dried apricot with age. Texture is the point: good Marsanne has an oily, glycerol-rich weight in the mouth that is quite unlike the crisper Mediterranean whites.

Its weakness is that low acidity, which makes it prone to flabbiness in hot sites and heavy handling. Growers manage it by picking earlier than the sugar levels alone would suggest and by planting on cooler, higher slopes.

In Hermitage, Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Péray it makes the white wines of the appellation, blended with Roussanne in proportions that vary by producer. White Hermitage in particular is one of the most long-lived dry whites in France, and it has a famous habit of closing up for a decade after bottling before re-emerging.

It is also widely planted in the Languedoc, and in Australia's Victoria — where the Goulburn Valley holds some of the oldest Marsanne vines anywhere, planted in the nineteenth century — it makes a distinctive honeysuckle-scented wine that ages for decades.

In Switzerland's Valais it is Ermitage and makes a rich, often late-harvested alpine white.