Look beyond Provence’s bustling rosé scene, and you will find a range of other wines and drinks hiding behind it. Are they new—or are they part of a diverse and historic tradition? Monastic herb-infused liqueurs, cooked-must vin cuit, big reds, light reds, fresh whites, aged marc, homemade vin de noix and vin d’orange (wine infused with walnuts and oranges, respectively): Provence has it all, closely kept secrets for local consumption.
Tourism contributes significantly to Provence’s appeal. Drinking white Cassis with freshly caught fish or sitting in a café with a citron pressé, pastis, or chilled glass of rosé epitomizes the Provençal lifestyle, from the Côte d’Azur to the golden villages of Luberon, from the papal city of Avignon to the naval port of Toulon. It is only in the past 20 years that rosé has dominated the scene.
But all roads lead not just to rosé but also from rosé.
Rosé’s astronomic rise as a café wine has come partly at the expense of pastis, whose market share has declined as rosé’s has grown. In 2013, Pernod Ricard launched Pastis 51 Rosé in a failed attempt to regain ground, but the more interesting rosé butterfly effect is in the growing demand for artisanal pastis brands, such as Henri Bardouin and Château des Creissauds. These brands lean into complex, plant-driven blends, target the trade and style-conscious drinkers, and favor fancy bottles intended for use in cocktails over the traditional carafe.
The increasing paleness of rosé has blurred the lines between rosé, blanc de noir, and white wine. Technical advances developed for rosé are increasingly applied to fresh, crunchy whites, too, even as a few producers continue making richer, oaked, ageworthy versions. The shift hasn’t demanded much replanting, as white grapes were already planted across Provence for blending into rosé.
Orange wine is another spin-off from the rosé craze, made by a few producers, often from old varieties not permitted in the appellations. Skin contact is already part of Provençal wine culture; shifting that focus onto white varieties is a natural next step. Often made in cement, amphorae, and jarres, these wines take the path opposite that of crisp, reductive rosés, chasing texture and structure instead.
The same instinct is pulling Provence toward darker rosés on one end and lighter summer reds on the other. Producers of Provence reds, in Bandol especially, are moving away from heavy extraction and maceration, alongside the fascinating new blouge (a portmanteau of blanc and rouge) trend, which, like blanc de noir, blurs the line between red and white wines. Lively, fruit-driven, and refreshing, these wines are slowly nudging aside the region’s traditional big reds.
The sparkling-wine category, especially pink bubbles, is also growing, exuding the same glamorous lifestyle appeal as still rosé. Most estates now produce a sparkling wine, but styles are inconsistent and quality variable.
Rosé remains the mainstay of commercial production, and Provence is proving to be more buoyant than many other regions. Diversity of styles is part of both its history and its future.
–Elizabeth Gabay and Ben Bernheim
Before phylloxera, white grapes were often dried and made into sweet wine. In the last century, white wines have taken a back seat, with only the whites of Cassis being highly regarded. [Rosemary] George, in 1990, declared that “with few exceptions this is not a region for white wine.” The growth of rosé has changed that, both by transforming attitudes and by revolutionizing winemaking. A large share of the white grapes across Provence goes not into whites but into the rosés, with most appellations allowing white grapes to comprise between 10 and 50 percent of rosé blends, although they are usually limited to 20 percent of plantings. White wine has slowly premiumized, sometimes in parallel with and sometimes at the expense of the rosés. The percentage of white produced is slowly growing, overtaking reds in Côtes de Provence for the first time ever in 2024. Since 2010, Les Baux includes whites, and La Londe has since 2016. The overall growth in plantings, however, is minimal: the growth in production seems, for now, to be coming from white grapes being removed from rosé blends, or, in a few cases, white varieties being grafted over less exciting parcels of red—an expensive but fast option.
Although producers here are keen to emphasize that they sell out of their white wine every year and cannot make enough of it, this needs to be seen in context: across almost all of Provence, white wine makes up between 5 and 10 percent of production. Despite the small numbers, a wide variety of styles are being made, including orange wine, blancs de noirs, fresh whites, and richer, often oaked, styles. Rolle, over the past thirty years, has become increasingly common, spreading westward from Bellet, Liguria, and Corsica. Modern styles often have a grapefruit thiol character similar to that of early modern rosés. Uptake of oak and amphora has been surprisingly slow, initially reserved to more ambitious producers, but these materials are increasingly becoming more mainstream.
Orange wine is not wholly absent from the region, and, although it can be a bit hit-and-miss, there are some lovely wines. Despite often having a rosé color, these wines are the complete opposite to rosé—textured, tannic, and somewhat savory. A wide range of varieties are used, such as Rolle, Sauvignon Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Clairette, Viognier, Ugni Blanc, Carignan Blanc, Roussanne, Chardonnay, Muscat, Marsanne, Bourboulenc, and Sémillon, and the wines tend to be made by the more dynamic and innovative estates. With Rolle increasingly dominating white-wine production, it is often the more unusual varieties, and lower-yielding older vines, that are used for the small-volume orange-wine production. Extended skin contact, sometimes of over ten days, is not unheard of for wines labeled as whites, such as at La Bastide Blanche, in Bandol, and Domaine Val de Caire, in Rognes.
Orange wine (vin orange) is not to be confused with vin d’orange, a local drink made with wine (sometimes rosé), sugar, and orange peel. The latter is usually a homemade affair, although some producers, such as Domaines Bunan, make it commercially.
Blanc de noir wines are an increasingly popular option for winemakers in response to the increased demand for white wine. Provence is indeed short of white grapes, so many white wines fall into one of two categories: a “white” wine that is really just a very, very pale, unripe rosé, occasionally carbon-filtered; or a premium wine, sometimes oaked, using only pale first-press juice. The latter is seen as easier to justify (and sell) as a serious white rather than a serious rosé, even if the winemaking is identical.
Despite the preponderance of rosé in the region, Provence is not immune from the belief that rosé is a secondary wine that will never achieve the greatness of reds. In the minds of many vignerons here, it is the reds of Provence that best express their terroir and deliver quality.
There was a time when some wine critics shared this view and saw a future only for the reds. In many subregions of Provence, we agree. Although rosé dominates volumes (especially in export markets), this paints only half the picture: small and premium producers are significantly more likely to make reds and whites in greater proportions, with the big players who make 100 percent rosé clouding the statistics. Provence was, and still is, to an extent, a land of southern reds just as much as it is one of trendy rosé.
The most renowned red wines of Provence are those of Bandol, but there are also producers elsewhere in the region who are primarily famous for their reds, such as Domaine de Trévallon. In 1990, the market was very different. George felt that “for the majority of Frenchmen, the first requirement of a wine is that it should be red. Consequently, in the past few years, perhaps prompted by the granting of appellation status, there has been a gentle drift towards red wine among the serious growers.” In contrast, today, over 30 percent of wine consumed in France is rosé; white wine is also gaining in popularity at the expense of red wine.
Significantly, however, few of the obstacles to the recognition of Provençal red wine have changed in the last quarter century. In an article written for Decanter in 2000, Anthony Peregrine felt that one of the major obstacles to the recognition of the red wines of Provence was that “their global reputation has been built on big volume rosé which projects an image of cheap, easy glugging wines glistening on the sun-filled terraces of the Côte d’Azur. Great for cash flow but hardly the image for a serious red wine region.” Later in his article, Peregrine points to the typical lack of vintage portfolio for red wines as another significant hurdle. Twenty-five years later, for most producers, little has changed. Reds and rosés are not simply different wines; they have different business models and marketing strategies.
The new trend for summer reds fits the new Provence style. These red wines are lighter and fresher for drinking young. The term blouge is a contraction of blanc (white) and rouge (red) and is normally reserved for wines described as neither red nor white, usually made from both red and white grapes. It is sometimes used for summer reds but, in practice, is simply a term used to describe dark rosés made in Provence today, considered sexier than the potentially old-fashioned clairets. In appellations such as Bandol, where Bandol AOC cannot be made from Mourvèdre until its eighth vintage, making a light, easy red from Mourvèdre makes sense. Wines are often made using carbonic maceration or cold fermentation to enhance their fresh fruitiness.
These blouges, ultimately a subset of the increasingly popular chilled-red category, have tremendous potential in Provence, but many producers are pushing back. Having based so much of their marketing over the last twenty years on the paleness of their rosé, many find themselves backed into a corner of their own making. Chilled reds are seen as a dangerous rival, a threat to their success, rather than a complement to their range and a natural progression of quality wines in Provence. Those producers who do make chilled reds or blouges in Provence tend to be the ones who made interesting rosé, while those who have staked their business on rosé are doubling down on the paleness rather than embracing quality and customer demand for wines with a bit more fruit and body. For now, at least, although the wines that are made are excellent and quaffable, few have any pretensions to seriousness, and none aspire to capitalize on the trend toward premiumization enjoyed by the paler wines here.
Provence is also keen to take advantage of the popularity of sparkling wines, especially sparkling rosé. A large handful of producers make sparkling wine, and although by volume Charmat-method wines dominate, the majority of premium fizz here is made using méthode provençale. This is, in effect, méthode champenoise with the addition of frozen grape must from the last harvest for dosage. Maintaining acidity is a problem, and high-quality sparkling wine from Provence is still finding its way.
The relatively unusual vin cuit, or “cooked wine,” has a history dating back to Roman times. This sweet wine is made by simmering the grape juice of either black or white grapes of any variety over a period of a couple of days, with care being taken to not overcook or burn it, which would result in a strong caramel flavor. This reduces the must by 30 to 55 percent, and the must is then fermented. This can take anything from two weeks to a year. It can then be aged in barrel for a short time, up to around five years. The wine style will depend on the amount of aging, with younger wines having a fresher and fruitier character, developing quince jam or orange-peel notes. Long-aged vin cuit becomes darker, with notes of toast, chocolate, licorice, caramel, spice, and dried fruit.
The wine was never produced in any significant volume until growing demand in the early years of the nineteenth century resulted, in 1822, in the development of more large-scale commercial production by Ferdinand Houchard, in Palette. Within five years, the Count de Villeneuve estimated that 2,000 hectoliters of vin cuit was being produced in the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône.
Today, despite attempts from producers to create an appellation, vin cuit is an outsider with no regulations, largely because bureaucracy cannot decide how to classify the wine. It remains a niche product with around fourteen producers, and the wine sells out as soon as it goes on the market, with locals buying a bottle for Christmas.
Provence’s other wine-adjacent drink is marc, a spirit distilled from the solid leftovers of the winemaking process. It is analogous to Italian grappa, although here the raw, somewhat coarse spirit is usually left to mellow in oak barrels for a long time—occasionally decades—leaving it a dark caramel color and resulting in a product more similar in style to an aged brandy. The solid marc is, in the case of rosé or white, refermented and distilled; if it is made from the leftovers of the red process (which seems to be somewhat more common), it is simply distilled.
Although not protected by an AOC, Marc de Provence has an indication géographique. It mandates that the marc must come from AOC vineyards across Provence. The allowed list is a rare example of an official admission of what constitutes “viticultural Provence” and includes all the appellations we talk about in this book: Bandol, Les Baux, Bellet, Cassis, Côtes de Provence, Coteaux d’Aix, Coteaux Varois, Luberon, Palette, Pierrevert, and Ventoux.
In practice, because of local traditions and existing customers, many of today’s producers of marc are in Bandol, although they are indeed found across the region. Many of these producers possess a small and artisanal still, while others rely on industrial distilling, choosing to age the marc themselves. There are distilleries that produce a marc without owning any vineyards themselves.
Rosé may now be the drink of Provence, but until relatively recently it was pastis which was drunk in cafés, in bars, and at boules courts. Go to any vide-greniers (flea market) and you can pick up stylish old pastis glasses and branded water carafes. On hot summer days, we still enjoy a glass on the terrace with a bowl of local olives.
The anise-flavored drink absinthe, which took France by storm during the nineteenth century, was banned in 1915. Other aniseed-based drinks were also popular around the Mediterranean, including sambuca in Italy, and ouzo, arak, raki, and mastika, in Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East. It was inevitable that many of these anise-flavored drinks would be found in the great trading port of Marseille. Pernod, the original producer of absinthe, introduced its own version of an aniseed-flavored drink with a lowered alcohol content and no wormwood. Commercial French pastis has a more distinctive licorice character, whereas Greek ouzo has more of an aniseed flavor. In 1938, Paul Ricard, the son of a Marseille wine merchant, created a new drink to take the place of Pernod. He created the name, working on the Provençal pâtisson and the Italian pasticcio, both of which mean “mixture.” The drink was flavored with star anise (from China and Vietnam), licorice root (from the Mediterranean), fennel, thyme, and rosemary.
Pastis is normally diluted with water before drinking, typically five parts water to one part pastis, and is often presented neat with a jug of water for drinkers to blend as they wish. On mixing, the alcohol percentage of the contents of the glass is reduced and the previously transparent pastis goes cloudy, because pastis contains terpenes, which become insoluble when diluted to an ethanol percentage of below 30. Drunk cold, pastis is popular on hot summer days. Ice cubes can be added after pouring in water to avoid crystallization of the anethole (from the aromatic herbs). Sales slumped during the Second World War, as between 1940 and 1949 it was illegal to sell alcohol above 16% ABV. Pernod and Ricard merged into one production house in 1974. The drink is still firmly associated with Marseille and the south, and it seems that rosé plays a relatively similar role in café culture.
This excerpt first appeared in The Wines of Provence, written by Elizabeth Gabay and Ben Bernheim and published by Académie du Vin Library in July 2026. It has been minimally edited for style, length, and audience. Used with permission.
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