Grand Reserve Blanquette De Limoux

90% Mauzac, 5% Chardonnay, 5% Chenin. Methode
Champenoise, a delicate, crisp, floral, lightly spicy delight
of a sparking wine.

Blanquette de Limoux is considered to be the first sparkling white wine produced in France, created long before the Champagne region became world-renowned for the sparkling wine Champagne. The first textual mention of “blanquette,” from the Occitan expression for “the small white,” appeared in 1531 in papers written by Benedictine monks at an abbey in Saint-Hilaire. They detail the production and distribution of Saint-Hilaire’s blanquette in cork-stoppered flasks. The region’s location, north of the cork oak forest of Catalunya, gave Limoux producers easy access to the material needed to produce secondary fermentation in the flask, which produces the bubbles necessary for sparkling wine.

In 1938, Blanquette de Limoux became one of the first AOCs established in the Languedoc region (1936 AOCs included Muscat de Frontignan in the Languedoc and Rivesaltes, Maury, and Banyuls in the Roussillon). While the classification is recent, the wine has long been a traditional apéritif or dessert accompaniment in the area.