What Is Blouge?

One of our customers, Jess, first tasted blouge at a drinks party — poured by a sommelier her sister's friend had brought along in the Netherlands.

She's been trying to track it down in the UK ever since, and struggling.

That's not a coincidence. Blouge is everywhere in Paris's hip wine shops right now. In Britain, it's barely landed.

So what actually is it?

What Is Blouge, Exactly?

Blouge is a portmanteau of blanc and rouge — white and red.
It's a wine made by fermenting red and white grapes together, rather than blending two finished wines afterwards.
That distinction matters more than it sounds: in the EU, it's actually illegal to mix a finished white wine into a finished red to make a rosé, except in Champagne.
So blouge sits in its own category by necessity, not just by style.
Because it doesn't fit any recognised appellation rules, it's almost always bottled as Vin de France.

The result sits somewhere between a serious rosé and a very light red — pale ruby to bright magenta in the glass, built to be served chilled, with the fresh acidity of white grapes carrying the fruit of the red.

Unlike rosé, it actively includes white grapes rather than just brief skin contact on reds. Unlike orange wine, it isn't white grapes fermented on their skins — there's real red fruit in there too.

A Very Old Idea With a New Name

The name is recent. The idea isn't.

Co-fermenting red and white grapes together is an old, practical habit from vineyards where different colours of vine grew side by side and got picked and pressed together, whatever the row happened to hold.

Spain's claretes and Portugal's palhetes are older regional cousins of the same idea.

In France, there's only one place allowed to co-ferment red and white grapes and keep its appellation status: Côte-Rôtie in the northern Rhône, where a small amount of Viognier has traditionally gone into the Syrah.

Everywhere else doing it today is working entirely outside the appellation system — which is exactly why Blouge only exists as Vin de France.

How Blouge Is Made

There's no single recipe, because the whole point is regional opportunism: winemakers use whatever red and white varieties they're already growing next to each other.

In the south of France that might mean Grenache or Syrah co-fermented with Rolle or Picpoul. In the Loire, Grolleau and Chenin Blanc.

In Beaujolais, it's often Gamay and Chardonnay — which is exactly what's growing on Anne's plot.

Anne's Blouge — Domaine Lachat, Beaujolais

Anne Lekkerkerker moved from Amsterdam to the Beaujolais village of Régnié in 2018 with her husband Thijs, originally just to raise their children in the French countryside.

The vineyards happened to come with the house. 

In 2020, after completing her wine training, she made her first harvest — three hectares of Gamay and Chardonnay, farmed organically, with sheep, pigs and chickens grazing the cover crop between the vines to help restore the granite soil.

Her blouge, Pourquoi-Pas, is a 2025 co-ferment of Gamay and Chardonnay — handpicked, spontaneously fermented with indigenous yeast, and semi-carbonic maceration.

Organic certified (AB), 13% alcohol, Vin de France. Light enough to serve cold, with enough going on to still hold your attention.

Why It's Still Hard to Find Here

Blouge has been building steadily in France for four or five years — it turns up on the natural wine discovery app Raisin, posted by bars and shops mostly across France, but the movement hasn't really crossed the Channel yet.

Most of what exists is sold in small volumes, direct from small producers like Anne, without an importer or distributor picking it up and putting it on a UK shelf.

That's really the whole reason Jess couldn't find it. It's not that blouge is rare — it's that almost none of it is getting into the UK through the usual channels. Buying direct from the winemaker, the way Vivan works, is one of the few routes that actually gets it here at all.