Muristek
Beaujolais, riesling, muscadet … so many styles that fell off wine lists after the 1980s are well worth revisiting
What is it that makes some wines popular and others beyond the pale? For example, during the 2010s the southern French dry white picpoul de pinet became a must-have for every supermarket and wine bar. It was often sold as the Languedoc’s answer to muscadet. And yet, while picpoul can be perfectly nice in a clean, doesn’t touch the sides, refreshing with seafood sort of way, and reasonably priced, it’s never exactly thrilling.
Muscadet itself, meanwhile, can be awful: painfully tart, sour and mean, a fact that may account for its loss of popularity since it was a staple of wine lists in the 1970s and 80s. But the good bottles are so much more exciting than the rows of quite good picpoul; at their saline, yeasty, lemony best (Jean-François Baron Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie 2020; £11.25, yapp.co.uk) they are an economical alternative to chablis. They’d be at the top of any list I might draw up of “neglected wines I wish people drank more of”.
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