Poulsard

Poulsard is the pale red of the Jura, so lightly pigmented that its wines are often mistaken for rosé in the glass. It is thin-skinned to the point of fragility, prone to rot and to coulure, and ripens early — a difficult vine that survives because the Jura has never found anything that does what it does.

The colour is the first thing anyone notices: onion-skin orange, translucent, sometimes barely darker than a dark rosé even after a fortnight on skins. The second is that despite the colour, it tastes emphatically like a red wine. Sour cherry, redcurrant, dried strawberry, a savoury undertow of forest floor and cured meat, and enough acidity to keep it lively. Tannin is very low, which is why it is nearly always served cool.

In Arbois and the surrounding villages it makes light, perfumed reds, sometimes handled oxidatively in the Jura manner, sometimes made reductively and cleanly to emphasise fruit. It is also blended with Trousseau and Pinot Noir, and it is a component of Crémant du Jura.

Its other life is in Bugey, south towards Savoie, where it makes Bugey-Cerdon: a sweet pink sparkling wine produced by the ancestral method, bottled before fermentation finishes, low in alcohol and tasting of fresh strawberries. It is one of the most straightforwardly delicious wines in France and is treated with much less reverence than it deserves.

The grape's spelling varies by village — Ploussard around Pupillin, Poulsard elsewhere — which is the kind of detail the Jura enjoys.