Mauzac

Mauzac is the grape of the Tarn and the Aude in south-west France, and it has a strong claim to being the variety behind the world's oldest sparkling wine. Blanquette de Limoux records a sparkling wine made by monks at Saint-Hilaire in the sixteenth century, well before Champagne developed its own method, and the technique used there — bottling the wine before fermentation has finished so that it completes under cork — is the ancestral method that pét-nat producers rediscovered four centuries later.

The grape has an unusual and immediately recognisable aroma: bruised apple, quince, cider, sometimes a faint note of dried hay. It is not elegant in the way Chardonnay is elegant, and producers in Limoux have steadily replaced it with Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc for exactly that reason, keeping Mauzac as a minority component of the blend. Its stronghold is now Gaillac, further north, where growers treat it as a regional signature rather than a liability.

Gaillac makes the full range from it. The méthode gaillacoise sparkling wines are cloudy, gently fizzy, off-dry and faintly funky, fermented with nothing added and stopped by cold rather than by sulphur. There are dry still whites with a bitter-apple bite and real acidity, and there are late-harvest sweet wines where the cider character turns to baked apple and honey.

It ripens late and holds acidity well, which is what makes the ancestral method workable — the residual sugar and the acid balance each other. The natural wine movement has adopted it enthusiastically, which has done more for the grape's visibility in twenty years than the previous two centuries managed.