White Wine Values from France : Picpoul de Pinet on the Mediterranean Coastline

So what's the Grape Explorer talking about today? So, as you know, we are always on a journey to discover what we feel is great wine, especially French, because I do spend a lot of time with, you know, importing French wine and, you know, done quite a bit in my history, but I'm going to explain a little bit of an area that I think is interesting because it is up and coming. It has been on the radar of a lot of key retailers in the United States, but we're going to bring up a property that we are now involved with, and it's called Domaine du Balmain, and right here, and it's in the area of Pickpool. Pickpool is interesting. It's a grape, Pickpool, that is definitely Mediterranean. You don't see too much of this grape in other regions of the world, but we're going to point right out on our transit map, which we always love to see our transit map, and it's all the way down on the bottom, and you can see right here where Montpellier is, you know, this is the largest city in this area, and you have right here Pickpool de Pigny, and we're going to talk about this wine because, again, we're going to be doing a business with this property, so we wanted to at least highlight this property, but I also wanted to bring up an interesting aspect about France because a lot of people don't understand French wines to a certain degree. There are two segments of the industry as what we call producers of France. One of them is a coopératif, and coopératif exists all over France, and basically, what a coopératif is, is basically a partnership between, it could be 20 to 100 different growers of grapes. Now, a lot of these producers do not want to go to the expense of making wineries, and it costs a lot of money, stainless steel fermentation, to hire a staff of people, you know, so usually the coopératif is what they call a cooperative between people who, they're partners of the company, and in this area, they do have a very, very large coopératif, and so you might in the past have seen Pickpool de Pigny in the past, and it does come from the coopératif to Pickpool, but right next door to that property is a single domain that's owned by a family here, and this is called Domaine de Belmar, which we're going to spend some time talking about today, and they specialize in Pickpool de Pigny, and this is a beautiful grape, it actually, you know, has a lot of the things that I really, I really like, and I always explain to people, because I love white wine, I'm very passionate about white wine, but again, I always say that, you know, some of the best white wines in all of the world, not just in France, are located along the ocean or the sea, and you can see this is right here, so what you get is, you get these Mediterranean breezes that are coming in here, which causes the wine to have what we call this maritime influence, and the maritime influence has caused the wine to have a lot of salinity, and of course, this is some mineral deposits here, this is limestone soils, perfect climate to be producing wines, but actually, the other thing that's interesting about this wine, and this area, is it's the most famous area in certain areas, especially in the Mediterranean, for oysters, because there's an area called the Echan de Tau, which is the estuary, which is right in front of the vineyards here, and they have what's called oyster beds, so finest oysters that you ever have, and of course, what goes with the oysters is this pick and pull, these wines are really good, and when I say really good, it has all of that stone fruit that just leaps out of the glass, you get floral scents too, you get a lot of flowers that are in these wines, a really, really expressive style, you know, you can see the color, this is 2023, so look at this color, it's not completely different from Sauvignon Blanc, look at the legs on this wine too, it's oozing with richness in the style of this wine, it spends, what they do is extended lees contact to make the wine creamy and rich, but we're going to taste the wine right now, I can taste the mineral tone, that bright acidity, you get that salinity, now I can see why it goes with the oysters, because if anybody's ever had really briny oysters, you know, you need something to keep up with that salty, kind of saline, kind of briary, kind of like thoughts when having oysters, and having these wines, but these are beautiful wines, I wanted to zoom in on Hugh Johnson, he did a great job of highlighting this region of pick and pull, and actually you can see its proximity to the basin here, which we call the Basin du Tal, which is the estuary I was talking about, these are the oyster beds right here, and these are considered some of the finest oysters in all of France, and again, you know, if anybody's ever in this region and you want to go to the Mediterranean, or you want to go to Provence, they're very close, very close right here to Montpellier, and right down here, and you can see it's very close also to Cote d'Orone area, but this is the Languedoc Pickpool de Pinay, it's one of the finest white wines, these are great values, I also wanted to highlight the fact that Belmar just got noted, this wine right here got 92 points in Decanter magazine, and it was the highest rated pickpool in the recent Decanter, and 92 points for a white wine, especially from the Languedoc is quite high, so I was very excited not only to taste their wines, but also to learn a little bit more about this area, because I'm very passionate about white wine, I love whites, especially going with seafood and shellfish, oysters I adore, so when I found out that this was a possibility to bring in, I was all over this, and I said, okay, we gotta really develop a good structure behind these wines to educate people, and again, it's not that difficult to pronounce this, Pickpool, and then that's the grape, and it's called Pickpool Pinay, and that is the region, that is the area, again, this is The Grape Explorer, we're trying to highlight really terrific wines, and I think we brought one to the table today. Cheers!