Roussanne

Roussanne is the more refined and considerably more difficult of the northern Rhône's two white grapes. Its name comes from roux, russet, after the coppery colour the berries take on when ripe.

Where Marsanne gives weight, Roussanne gives aroma and structure: herbal tea, pear, quince, honeysuckle and a distinctive note of chamomile or dried herbs, with markedly higher acidity and a fine, mineral, almost nervy quality. With age it develops honey, nuts and a waxy complexity, and the best examples last for decades.

It is genuinely hard to grow. Roussanne ripens late and unevenly, is highly susceptible to powdery mildew and to botrytis, and yields erratically from one year to the next. Those problems nearly finished it in the northern Rhône, where growers replaced it with the more dependable Marsanne through much of the twentieth century, and the two are blended largely because Roussanne alone is too risky to rely on.

In Châteauneuf-du-Pape it is one of the permitted white varieties and produces the appellation's most ageworthy whites. In Savoie, under the name Bergeron, it makes the wine of Chignin-Bergeron, a full-bodied alpine white of real distinction.

California and Australia have both taken it up, largely through the Rhône enthusiasts of the 1990s, though a significant proportion of what was planted in California under the name turned out on DNA testing to be Viognier.

It is the more interesting grape of the pair and the one worth seeking out unblended.