Holidaymakers in the French resort of Sete can’t get enough of a new turquoise-coloured chardonnay that has been developed in Spain.
Restaurants, beach bars, holidaymakers and local residents have drunk their way through the first 2,000-bottle consignment of the turquoise-coloured beverage called Vindigo.
Now Rene Le Bail, the entrepreneur who sourced the wine and has put in an order for 35,000 more bottles from the vineyard, in the Almeria region. He said it boasts aromas of cherry, raspberry and passion fruit.
The wine is filtered through a pulp of red grape skins which contain a natural pigment, anthocyanin, and gives the wine its electric blue colour.
“I love the colour, it’s perfect for the summer. It brings happiness, joy, I really like it,” said Nora, a tourist from Singapore drinking it in a beachfront restaurant.
“It reminds me of something, I’m not sure which fruit but it makes me think of, I don’t know, maybe sweets from my childhood,” said Fredric, another diner.
Le Bail says he has been inundated with orders from across France, Belgium and Germany on the wine’s Facebook page and says demand for the wine stretches as far as Russia, the Caribbean and China.
“We’ve said no to all the big supermarkets. We want in France to sell the wine through small-scale wine merchants and grocers,” he said. “I think the bottles we’ve ordered will go in two months. Everybody wants it,” Le Bail told Reuters.
In a country where rosé wine was for decades seen as a poor cousin to red and white before becoming fashionable in recent years, not everyone shares Le Bail’s conviction that blue wine is here to last.
“It’s a bit heavy in its aromas,” said Philippe Delran, a bespectacled wine merchant in Sete who raised his eyebrows in thinly-concealed displeasure on judging the wine’s bouquet. “It needs more work.”