The Languedoc's great seaside white, made from Picpoul on the flat, saline shores of the Étang de Thau and built to be drunk ice-cold with the oysters farmed in the same lagoon. Crisp, lemony and faintly salty, it keeps a lip-stinging freshness in one of France's hottest corners — the grape's very name means "lip-stinger".
Once a bit-part player, Picpoul de Pinet won its own appellation and a devoted following as an inexpensive, food-loving white. It is a small triumph of terroir logic — the right grape, in the right place, for the right plate.