Super Cool Sparkling Rosé

In my never ending quest to consume every quality sparkling wine on the planet, we have found another winner: Bugey-Cerdon! (say “Boo-jay Sair-don”)

This sparkling rosé is a quintessential Francey not Fancy wine in so many ways:
1. It’s delicious.
2. It’s reasonably priced: just $24.99 on wine.com
3. It’s unique and most people haven’t heard of it, so it’s going to teach us some things.

Here we go:

Bugey is in Eastern France, south of the Jura Mountains, between Lyon and Geneva, Switzerland. According to Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine, Bugey was once considered part of Burgundy.

Bugey-Cerdon is a sparkling rosé, made with red grapes: Poulsard and Gamay. Poulsard isn’t a very well-known grape. You’ll mostly find it in the Jura, where it makes light red wines. You’re probably more familiar with Gamay, which is the grape in Beaujolais wines.

Bugey-Cerdon is a low alcohol sparkling wine: just 7%. It’s made using the méthode ancestrale, which creates lightly sparkling, slightly sweet wines by bottling the wine before all of the residual sugar has become alcohol. The wine keeps fermenting once it’s bottled, which makes all those light bubbles. You may have heard the trendy term “pet nat” or “pétillant naturel.” This is pet nat.

Now, let’s talk about this particular bottle: Patrick Bottex Bugey-Cerdon Rosé “La Cueille.” What a crazy cool wine! It has a magnificent cranberry color that reminds me of a Shirley Temple or Kir Royale (sparkling wine with a splash of cassis). In the glass, it has big bright bubbles that jumped right into my nose! In your mouth, it has a soft fizz that evaporates off your tongue pretty quickly. It has hints of cherry, berry, and rose petal and a slightly sweet grenadine finish. (I couldn’t get past the Shirley Temple visual.)

While I don’t typically like sweet sparkling wines, this one was refreshingly so, and would be a gorgeous apéritif (a French pre-dinner drink) with some light apps or a charcuterie board. I’d prefer a Bugey-Cerdon over a Lambrusco, because it’s so much lighter and more refreshing. And hell, it’s French. We all know where my allegiances lie! The slight sweetness makes this a great wine for spicy food or Asian cuisines. They can be challenging to pair, and this is an excellent match. We drank it with sweet Thai chili salmon and it was perfect. It’s also nice with dessert. We had it with Girl Scout cookies, but it would be awesome with a rhubarb pie or fruit tart.

Chin!