The palest serious red in France, Poulsard is a Jura native documented since the fourteenth century, at home in Arbois and above all in Pupillin, the village that styles itself its world capital. Its skin is so thin and so lightly pigmented that even long macerations yield a translucent, rose-tinged wine often mistaken for rosé in the glass.
That fragility is the whole bargain. In the vineyard it buds dangerously early and suffers frost, coulure and rot; in the bottle it is ethereal — redcurrant, rose and wild strawberry over a fine, barely-there tannin. Long a local curiosity poured beside the Jura's whites, it found a second public when the natural-wine bars adopted its featherweight reds as a house style.