Petite Arvine - Valle d'Aosta, Italy and Vétroz, Switzerland

Today's post is hardest kind of post to write.  I've this really cool, rare grape to write about and my research keeps coming up with nothing.  Sure, there's a sentence here or there about Petite Arvine, but there isn't all that much of substance.  Sometimes I get lucky with these things and find out that there's some kind of controversy or interesting mystery about a grape, but with Petite Arvine, there just doesn't seem to be anything like that. I could, of course, just ignore the grape and move on, but I bought two bottles of this stuff and am going to find some way to make use of them.  So, without further ado, here's what I was able to find about Petite Arvine.

Petite Arvine's origins are mysterious, but unfortunately that's all they are.  The grape is thought to be native to Switzerland and one source claims that it has been grown in the Valais regions of Switzerland since 1602, while another source dates it to 1878.  The 1878 date is important, as it is when the International Ampelographic Society met in Geneva and decided that Petite Arvine was a unique grape not found anywhere else in the Valais or in the world.  It is this article that people point to when trying to establish a Swiss origin for the grape, but without knowing exactly how thorough their search was, it's hard to say how credible their statement is.  The grape is also known today in the Valle d'Aosta of Italy and some source say that the grape is actually named for the Arve valley around Savoy where the grape is thought to have entered the Valais region, possibly from the Valle d'Aosta.  In either case, the grape almost certainly has Alpine origins and today is found virtually nowhere other than the Valais and the Valle d'Aosta.

The grape's parentage is a mystery as well.  Petite Arvine was thought to be closely related to Amigne for some time, but recent DNA testing has shown that they may not be that closely related after all.  It does seem to be distantly related to Prié Blanc, Premetta and possibly Chasselas.  The grape is commonly known as Arvine these days, though the Petite Arvine name was necessary for many years to differentiate it from another grape known as Grosse Arvine (or sometimes Arvine Grande) which has larger berries and which makes wine of a much lower quality.  Today, Grosse Arvine is practically extinct (it does not exist in cultivation but only in grape collections) so the distinction isn't as important. The two grapes are related, but not as closely as their names might have you believe.  Confusingly, both Arvine and Arvine Grande are synonyms for Silvaner, which is not related to either Petite Arvine or Grosse Arvine.

Viticulturally, Petite Arvine is a very late ripener, sometimes ripening a full month later than Chasselas.  As a result, the vine needs a lot of sun to ensure that it gets completely ripe and it also needs to be protected from the wind as the clusters can be fragile.  Wines made from the grape are highly esteemed, and though the Oxford Companion to Wine doesn't have much to say about Petite Arvine, it does say that it is "the finest of the grape specialties of Valais."  Despite it's high critical esteem, Petite Arvine is not very widely grown, occupying only about 150 hectares of land in Switzerland, though this figure is up significantly from the 65 hectares planted in the year 2000.  I couldn't find any numbers on the Italian acreage devoted to the grape, but you can be sure that it is extraordinarily small.  Wines made from the grape run the gamut from bone dry to sticky sweet.

I was fortunate enough to find a bottle of Petite Arvine from both Switzerland and Italy.  The first bottle I found was the 2007 Romain Papilloud Cave du Vieux Moulin Petite Arvine from the Vétroz region of Switzerland (home to our old friend Amigne).  The wine came in a 500 mL bottle and I picked it up for about $39.  In the glass, the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was very shy with a little bit of peaches and honey and something a little flowery, but it was mostly a blank and never really opened up.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly low acidity and was surprisingly dry.  Given the size of the bottle, I was expecting something a little sweet, but this wasn't it.  There were flavors of honeysuckle flower and under ripe peaches, but it was mostly metallic and hollow tasting.  I don't say this very often, but this was an awful bottle of wine.  It tasted like chemicals and was just bitter and mean.  It was so bad, I was only able to get through one glass and had to pour the rest down the sink, which I almost never do.  I don't know if this was just a bad bottle or if this wine always tastes this way, but for $39, I won't be running the experiment twice.

The second bottle that I picked up was the 2005 Grosjean Petite Arvine which I got from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $30.  In the glass the wine was a yellow gold color that was so vibrant it almost had a kind of neon tinge to it.  The nose was very aromatic with ripe apple, butterscotch, pineapple tropical fruit, lees and a biscuitty, pastry-like kind of thing going on.  On the palate, the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acidity.  There were flavors of ripe apple and pear, pastry dough, and a distinctive leesy, cheesy kind of flavor to it (the wine is fermented and held on its lees, which are stirred, for a month).  I thought I was picking up some oak, but this wine is stainless steel fermented, so it was probably just from the lees contact.  The wine not all that fleshy, but the flavors seem very decadent and rich.  Nearly everything I've read about Petite Arvine says that the wines characteristically taste like grapefruits with a touch of salinity, but that wasn't my experience with these two bottles.  While I wasn't a fan at all of the Swiss bottle, the Italian bottle was excellent and very enjoyable.  The price is pretty high here, but the quality is too.  I'd especially be interested in a more recent bottling from this producer, as I got the impression that this may have been starting to fade, though it wasn't dead yet.

Amigne de Vétroz - Valais, Switzerland

Reader Kate has translated this post into Polish.  Those interested in checking out her translation can do so here.

There are some grapes that are grown in such limited quantities that its a wonder that one ever runs across them at all.  When I'm reading about wine and I come across some of these super-obscure grapes, I can do little more than cross my fingers and hope that some insane importer is distributing something from that grape in my neck of the woods, but for the most part I have to make a mental note and hope that maybe one day I can visit some of these regions and bump into these grapes in their natural habitat.

Today's grape is one of those crazy-obscure grapes that I never expected to bump into.  To be totally fair, I actually had never heard of it until I saw it in the shop, but once I picked it up and did a little research, I realized what an unusual find I had made.  The grape is Amigne and it is a minor specialty of a very small region of Switzerland called Vétroz, which is located within the Valais in the southwestern part of Switzerland.  I have four different sources and all four have different figures for total acreage devoted to the vine.  The Oxford Companion to Wine is the most conservative giving a figure of 25 hectares under vine, while the first bottle that I was able to try indicates that there are 33 hectares under cultivation.  The Amigne producers website says there are a total of 38 hectares across all of Switzerland (with 27 of them in Vétroz) while Wikipedia indicates there are 43 acres under vine as of 2009.  Whatever the actual number is, it is very small.  To compound matters, Switzerland exports very little of its production (less than 2%) so finding a wine made from this grape is a serious challenge.

Be that as it may, two (yes, two) bottles did end up in my cellar, so I'm here to tell you a little about Amigne.  It's a very old grape, thought to have been brought to Switzerland by the Romans.  A writer named Columella (AD 4 – ca. AD 70) mentions a grape called vitis aminea in his De Re Rustica which is purported to be the very same Amigne grape grown today.  However, the first specific mention of Amigne in print doesn't come until 1878.  It was long thought to be related to Petite Arvine, but DNA studies have recently shown that it has a parent/offspring relationship with a grape called Petit Meslier, a nearly extinct grape grown in limited quantities in Champagne (there are about 20 hectares under vine there). This relationship also apparently means it is somehow related to Gouais Blanc and our old friend Savagnin, though I don't understand the family tree enough to completely sort out how they link together.

The first Amigne based wine that I tried was a 2003 Jean-Rene Germanier Amigne de Vétroz that I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $35.  The wine was a golden color in the glass with a fairly shy nose.  There were aromas of orange and honey with some marmalade, spice and floral notes to it.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium though just shy of being full-bodied with fairly low acidity.  It was sweet, which warrants a brief digression.

Amigne is made in many styles from bone dry to extraordinarily sweet.  Until 2005, you had no way of knowing which style was in the bottle you picked up just by looking at the label.  As of 2005, though, the winemakers of Vétroz all got together and introduced the abeilles scale to indicate the sweetness level of the wine.  The scale consists of a rating from one to three bees with each bee representing a step up on the sweetness ladder.  One bee (dry) means the wine has between zero and eight grams per liter of sugar; two bees (half-dry) indicates 9-25 g/l and three bees (sweet) means there is more than 25 g/l.

Since this bottle was made in 2003, it did not have the abeilles scale on the bottle, but I'd guess it would fall on the higher end of the two-bee rating, if you made me guess.  The lowish acidity of the grape exaggerates the sensation of sweetness, so while it tasted pretty sweet to me, I would hazard the opinion that it still was technically half-dry rather than fully sweet.  In any case, there were flavors of mandarin orange and tangerine with honeysuckle flowers, orange marmalade, apricot jam and baking spice.  Oz Clarke, in his Grapes and Wines notes that Amige can sometimes have a bit of a brown bread character to it, and that definitely came through a bit on the finish.  The wine is tasty and well-made, but the low acidity was a problem for me.  It came off syrupy and cloying without the acid balance and was tough to drink for more than a glass at a time.  It actually reminded me quite a bit of some of the off-dry whites from Georgia that I tasted a few months back, though it was a bit more complex and focused than those wines (and also double to triple the price).

When I bought the wine above, I wasn't sure about the aging potential of Amigne, so I wasn't sure if the wine was perhaps past its prime.  To hedge my bet, when I saw a bottle of the 2006 "Les Ruinettes" from Serge Roh at the Spirited Gourmet, I went ahead and picked the bottle up for about $34.  As it turns out, I didn't have anything to worry about as Amigne's drinking window is really open for 5-10 years beyond the vintage date.  In the glass, this wine was a light gold color with a fairly strong greenish tinge to it.  The nose was shy with some aromas of grapefruit peel and orange with a little honeysuckle flower, but overall there wasn't much going on.  On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with low acidity and was medium sweet.  It's hard to see from the picture, but this wine had an abeilles rating of two bees (you can see three bees, but only two of them are fully darkened, which is how the scale is measured).  There were flavors of mandarin orange, sweet grapefruit, and honeysuckle flowers with the same kind of brown-bread finish to it.  This wine was less obviously sweet than the other, and was higher in alcohol.  The Germanier bottle was 13.5% while this was 14.5%, indicating perhaps that more of the sugar was converted during fermentation, making this a little less sweet.  The overall taste sensation was the same, though, with a serious lack of acidity that I personally couldn't get over.  There probably are wine drinkers out there who will be a fan of this syrupy style, but personally, I'd rather invest in an auslese or spätlese level Riesling.

Chasselas - Switzerland

Chasselas is a grape with many names.  The Vitis International Variety Catalog lists 216 different names for this grape.  Those who are interested can feel free to peruse the list over on the VIVC database.  Generally, when a grape has that many names, it means that it's grown in a lot of different places, which is true: there are significant plantings in Germany and Austria and lesser plantings in France, Eastern Europe, northern Italy, Australia and Chile (what is grown in California as Golden Chasselas is probably really Palomino). It is a star grape, though, in only one place: Switzerland.

When one stops and reflects on the great, traditional wine regions of the world, Switzerland is not likely to cross many people's minds.  Viticulture is not a new phenomenon here, though.  Grape growing has a history in Switzerland going back at least to Roman times, though it is possible that its roots go back another thousand years.  Geographically, Switzerland is perhaps most associated with the high mountains of the Swiss Alps, but the Alps only constitute about 60% of the total land area of the country.  There is a large plateau just north of the Alps where most of the population of the country is located and which provides nearly all of the arable land for the country.  There are some grapes grown in some of the more mountainous areas and some grown in the northeastern part of the country, but the most important regions are located in the western part of the country around Lake Geneva near the French border. 

Somewhat surprisingly, given the mountainous terrain and northerly latitude, red wine production accounts for almost 60% of Swiss output with Pinot Noir (30% of vineyard acreage) and Gamay (10% of vineyard acreage) leading the way.  The other 40% is white wine and the overwhelming majority of white wine is produced from the Chasselas grape.  Chasselas covers about 27% of the vineyard area of Switzerland with the next closest white varietal being Müller-Thurgau at 3.3%.  For while, it was thought that Chasselas originated in Turkey or possibly Egypt and was the oldest known grape variety in the world, which may account for the overwhelming number of names it has.   More recent research, though, seems to indicate that the grape is native to Switzerland.  The Swiss make the most wine from Chasselas, but other countries in eastern Europe actually have more land devoted to cultivating the grape, but it is primarily grown as a table grape in those areas.

I was able to pick up a bottle of 2009 Dubaril Chasselas Vin de Pays from my friends at Bin Ends for about $13.  There is an appellation system in Switzerland that is very similar to the French AOC system.  Because this wine is labeled Vin de Pays, I don't have any more specific geographical reference for where it was produced than the name of the country itself.  I will say, though, that I've had Chasselas at various tastings from the Valais and Vaud regions of Switzerland, which are perhaps the best known wine producing regions in that country and that my impressions of the grape have been similar every time I have tried it.

In the glass, the wine was a pale, silvery straw color.  The nose was moderately open, but very one dimensional smelling of pears and little else.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with low acidity.  I guess the diplomatic thing to say is that Swiss neutrality does not stop with their politics.  The wine has a chalky kind of minerality to it with a little bit of apple peel and ripe pear fruit, but overall, there's just not much there.  Every time I taste a Chasselas, I get this overwhelming chalky taste that is a bit off-putting for me.  Plus, the wines are generally low in both acid and fruit so there's not much else in the wine to off-set that chalky sensation.  I keep waiting for a Chasselas-based wine to really grab me, but it just hasn't happened yet.  I'm not so chauvinistic about it that I'll write the whole grape and region off, but if anyone has any recommendations on the Chasselas front, please let me know as I'd love to have my mind changed about it.  I've heard that these are great fondue wines, and I guess that's as good a use as any for them.