Henri Maire’s classic ’Vin Fou’ gets an ambitious relaunch

he original ‘Vin Fou’ label has been marketed in France since the end of last year and was on display at ProWein this year with the aim of “creating a category”, says Pierre Jury, director of Burgundy group Boisset’s sparkling wine department, which produces 10 million bottles of sparkling wines including Crémant de Bourgogne and Crémant du Jura. “Boisset has the marketing capability to make it a strong brand. The onus is on us to wake up this ‘sleeping beauty’”.  

The original Vin Fou brand with its initial 50,000 launch run pales in comparison with the overall figures, but it aims to secure benchmark positioning by breaking the sparkling mould. At its facilities in Nuits-Saint-Georges, Boisset is offering a new interpretation of ‘Vin Fou’. Although the recipe remains a secret, its style has been overhauled to produce 10% ABV, 15 g of residual sugar and less than 2.5 bar in pressure, with a combination of the Charmat and ancestral methods for the bottle fermentation. “Our aim is to create a distinctive identity. This is not a sparkling wine or a Crémant or a Champagne”, summarises Jury.

In the glass, the sweetness – stemming from the traditional method Muscat – the freshness (due to the blend of Ugni blanc, Colombard and Chardonnay made using the Charmat method) and the typicity of Jura (which comes from the secret dosage without ‘vin jaune’, that “leaves too much of a mark even in small quantities”) structure this semi-sparkling wine. The must and base wine come from Gers and Charentes, but Boisset intends to become self-sufficient through its VIVAS project of innovative Val de Saône vineyards that currently cover 60 hectares. On the bottle itself, the label reproduces the jester (or ‘fou’ in French) originally drawn by Paul Grimault, who produced the animated film ‘Le Roi et l’Oiseau’ with Jacques Prévert in 1952. The bottle is not the traditional Champagne style but a more unusual format, reminiscent of the ‘clavelin’ used in Jura.