Viognier: The Grape That Nearly Disappeared

Viognier is one of the wine world’s great comeback stories — a grape that came within a whisker of vanishing entirely. In the early 1970s there were barely thirteen hectares of it left on the planet, almost all clinging to a few steep granite terraces above the Rhône. A grape that today perfumes glasses from California to Australia was, within living memory, down to its last few acres and a handful of stubborn growers. That it survived at all is largely the work of one man.

The wine it makes is worth the rescue. Viognier is intensely aromatic — peach, apricot, honeysuckle, and orange blossom — full-bodied and low in acidity, a hedonist’s white with a heady, floral lift unlike anything else. It also hides a secret role inside one of the world’s most famous red wines. This is the story of how the grape that nearly disappeared became a global star.

The grape that almost vanished

Viognier had every disadvantage a grape can have. It is a shy, unreliable cropper that ripens late and gives little, its home vineyards cling to punishing granite terraces that must be worked by hand, and by the mid-twentieth century it was deeply unfashionable. The two World Wars had drained the Rhône hills of labour, and growers who stayed had every incentive to pull out a stingy grape and plant something easier or more profitable.

The result was a slow-motion near-extinction. By 1971 the wine historian John Livingstone-Learmonth could count just 13.7 hectares of Viognier in the entire world — twelve in Condrieu and under two at the neighbouring estate of Château-Grillet.² A decade earlier, only about eight of Condrieu’s 170 potential hectares were even planted.¹ One of the world’s most distinctive grapes had shrunk to a footnote, and its future looked like a matter of years, not decades.

Condrieu and the man who saved it

Rescue came from Condrieu, and above all from one grower: Georges Vernay. When Vernay took over his family’s winery in 1953 he had a single hectare on the slope called Coteau de Vernon, and a grape almost nobody wanted.³ Over the following decades he did the unglamorous work of survival — replanting abandoned terraces stone by stone, championing the grape when it was worthless, and slowly convincing others that Condrieu was worth saving. He earned the nickname “the pope of Condrieu.”

It worked, and the numbers tell the story. The Condrieu appellation crept back from its 1970s nadir to twenty hectares by 1986, sixty by 1990, and roughly 184 today.⁴ A grape that had been all but written off became, within a generation, one of the most sought-after white wines in France — expensive, scarce, and adored.

The secret inside Côte-Rôtie

Viognier’s strangest role is one most drinkers never notice. Just north of Condrieu lies Côte-Rôtie, the “roasted slope,” source of some of the world’s most prized reds — and those reds are made from Syrah with a splash of white Viognier fermented right in with the red grapes.⁵ The appellation’s rules allow up to twenty percent Viognier, though in practice most producers use only a few percent, if any.

Crucially, it must be co-fermented, not blended in afterward. Thrown into the vat together, the white grape’s aromatics lift the wine with apricot and violet, and a chemical reaction between the two fixes and stabilises the red’s colour, making it brighter and more durable. It is one of winemaking’s most elegant tricks: a white grape hiding inside a great red, making it better from within. The technique has since been copied by Syrah growers around the world.

An aromatic style with an ancient past

Poured on its own, Viognier is unmistakable. It floods the glass with ripe peach, apricot, honeysuckle, and orange blossom, and fills the mouth with a rich, almost oily texture and gentle acidity that make it taste generous and warm.⁸ It is a wine to drink young, while the perfume is at its most exuberant, and it rarely needs the years of patience a Riesling rewards.

Its origins are murky and wrapped in legend. One old story credits the Romans with bringing the vine up the Rhône, and some accounts reach further, to Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast, though the hard evidence is thin. What is certain is that by the time records are clear, Viognier was a Rhône specialty — a local treasure that the twentieth century nearly lost, and that the wider world would only discover once it had been saved.

A global comeback

The revival soon leapt the Atlantic, and again a single obsessive made the difference. In 1989 a young Californian named John Alban, smitten by a glass of Condrieu, founded the first American winery devoted entirely to Rhône grapes, in the Edna Valley.⁶ At a time when there were fewer than fifty acres of Viognier in the entire world, Alban planted thirty-two of them, and the cuttings he propagated helped push California’s Viognier plantings from essentially zero to well over two thousand acres.

From there it spread everywhere the climate was warm enough to ripen it. Virginia embraced Viognier so enthusiastically that the state named it a signature grape after a 1993 example stunned tasters,⁷ and Australia, the Languedoc, and South America all took it up. The grape that in 1971 clung to thirteen hectares of French hillside now grows on tens of thousands of acres worldwide — proof that a wine can be pulled back from the very edge of extinction, and that sometimes all it takes is a few people who refuse to give up on it.

This day in wine history

• 1940
  Condrieu becomes an appellation

  The Northern Rhône’s home of Viognier is granted AOC status, around the villages of Condrieu, Vérin, and Saint-Michel.

• 1953
  Georges Vernay begins the rescue

  Vernay takes over his family winery with a single hectare and starts the decades-long work of saving Condrieu.

• c. 1971
  Viognier hits rock bottom

  Just 13.7 hectares of Viognier remain in the entire world — the grape is nearly extinct.

• 1989
  America falls for Viognier

  John Alban founds California’s first Rhône-dedicated winery and plants Viognier when almost none exists worldwide.

• Today
  A global revival

  Condrieu is back above 180 hectares and Viognier grows from Virginia to Australia.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Riesling, another great aromatic white with a comeback of its own
• Pinot Gris, one grape, two very different wines
• Alsace, France’s home of aromatic whites
• The origins of wine

References

1. Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding & José Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes (Allen Lane, 2012), Viognier entry. ↩
2. John Livingstone-Learmonth, The Wines of the Northern Rhône (University of California Press, 2005). ↩
3. “Viognier saviour Georges Vernay dies in the Rhône,” Decanter (2017). decanter.com. ↩
4. “Condrieu’s comeback with Vernay, Guigal and Chapoutier,” Vinfolio. vinfolio.com. ↩
5. “Why is Viognier added to some Syrah?” Wine Spectator. winespectator.com. ↩
6. Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo County, on John Alban and California’s Rhône movement. winehistoryproject.org. ↩
7. Virginia Vineyards Association, “Viognier: Virginia’s Signature Grape.” virginiavineyardsassociation.org. ↩
8. Jancis Robinson (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Wine (Viognier; Condrieu; Côte-Rôtie). ↩

The Wines of the Northern Rhône
John Livingstone-Learmonth
The definitive account of Condrieu, Côte-Rôtie, and the grapes that nearly vanished from them.

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