We don’t have much room to store cases of wine, so rather than offering people the same old list of Syrahs, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios and the rest of the usual suspects we thought we’d make up a wine list of the strangest and most unusual wines we could find, sort of like a wine zoo for exotic animals.

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Sometimes I spend a lot of time carefully picking out the wines on my list, but other times one just follows me home and I fall in love with the little scamp. Case in point:

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“A Cuvee Les Amours Hugel Pinot Blanc! Can I keep her?
I promise to feed her and wash her and walk her every day!”

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I’ve never had a French Pinot Blanc on my list before, but when this wine arrived as a last minute substitute for my Riesling, which was suddenly unavailable, I fell in love with its extreme Frenchiness pretty fast.

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I’ve had wines from the Hugel winery on my list before. Located in Riquewihr, a region of France that is not only hard to pronounce but has been known since the Middle Ages for having “the most noble wines of all the country,” the Hugel family have been making wine there since 1639. Hugel vineyards use no fertilizer and their ancient vines are picked by hand. Cuvee Les Amours is this Pinot Blanc’s name and it literally means “The Vat of Lovers,” or, slightly more poetically, “Wine…for Lovers Only.”
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Two glasses wait for their cold, crisp Cuvee
Les Amours to be poured.

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This is a dry white wine that has a lot of fruit on the nose — cantaloupe, green apple, watermelon — which gives it the illusion of sweetness. But it tastes totally different from how it smells. It’s creamy and round in the mouth, and the color of golden straw in the glass, with the aroma of toasted nuts. One of the most perfect food wines on my list, it’s a great companion for the grits and carrot buns, or practically anything on my menu. It’s very, very French: refreshing and dry with a bit of underlying acidity. The only thing keeping it from being totally French is the fact that it doesn’t have a cigarette dangling from its mouth.

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“I prefer a pipe.”

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This wine was an emergency replacement when my wine purveyor suddenly informed me that he couldn’t get me any more bottles of the Riesling. I was fully prepared to hate it and I expected it to be ordinary but drinkable plonk that would get me through a couple of days, but it turned out to be extraordinary. I’ve actually wound up liking it as much as I liked the Riesling but for now my purveyor can’t supply me with the Riesling I love. It might be back one day, but for now it’s been voted off the island.

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Pinot Blancs are a very strange grape. A minor mutation of Pinot Gris, which is in itself a mutant clone of Pinot Noir, it’s grown in very small quantities in France, while still being a major varietal of Italy, Austria and Germany. It looks so much like Chardonnay grapes when it’s on the vine that often Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay grapes grow in the same vineyards and only an expert can tell them apart. But don’t judge a grape by its cover. Pinot Blanc grapes couldn’t have a more different taste than Chardonnay. Gentle, rich and full-bodied, they’re often used to add body and depth to sparkling wine blends and in white burgundy blends. Often wine that’s sold as Pinot Blanc is actually Chenin Noir, or Auxerrois Blanc. This Hugel, however, is 100% real Pinot Blanc, and if you’ve never tasted just how good a true Pinot Blanc can be, then it’s your civic duty to find a bottle of Cuvee Les Amours and start drinking.

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