Apremont is wine grown on a catastrophe. In November 1248 the face of Mont Granier collapsed, one of the great landslides of European history, burying villages and their people under a chaos of limestone. The scar still hangs over the vineyard; the neighbouring cru remembers plainly, calling itself Abymes. In time, vines colonized the broken ground the mountain left behind.
The grape is Jacquère, and it makes no attempt at grandeur: barely 10.5 degrees, alpine herbs, flint and white flowers, drunk within a few years of the harvest. It is the fondue wine by appointment — poured cold in ski-station chalets against melted cheese — and, on its rubble of 1248, quietly one of France's strangest terroirs.