Pupillin

Pupillin is barely a village at all by most standards, a scatter of stone houses on a hillside a few minutes outside Arbois, and yet it calls itself, with a road sign to prove it, the capital of Poulsard — a pale, thin-skinned red grape that’s practically the Jura’s signature and grows almost nowhere else in France. We’d come from Arbois expecting a quick detour and stayed most of the afternoon, mostly because it felt like every third house had a hand-painted sign for a “cave” or a “dégustation,” and we ran out of willpower to keep driving past them.

A village made of cellars

Poulsard is a strange grape to explain to people who haven’t tasted it — thin-skinned enough that the wine it makes is often so pale it looks almost like a rosé, low in tannin, high in a kind of wild, earthy perfume that reminded me faintly of the pét-nat wines becoming fashionable everywhere else, except this tradition predates that trend by at least two centuries. We stopped at a small independent vigneron’s cellar where the woman pouring, maybe in her sixties, told us her family had worked these particular parcels since her grandfather’s time, and poured us a young Poulsard straight from a barrel with a wooden spigot, still faintly cloudy. It tasted like nothing else we’d had in the Jura, lighter than the vin jaune everyone talks about, but just as stubbornly regional.

Vines up to the doorsteps

What struck me most about Pupillin is how close the vineyards come to the village itself — there’s barely a transition, the last house’s garden simply becomes the first row of vines, and walking the lane above the village put us at eye level with the whole valley, Arbois visible in the distance and the marl slopes striped with vine rows all the way to the tree line. In late summer, before the harvest, the village hosts a wine festival, La Biou, that dates back to a 1360 vow made after the plague passed the village by, where a giant bunch of grapes is carried in procession to the church — a tradition Pupillin has kept going, more or less unbroken, for over six and a half centuries.

When to go: Early September for the harvest atmosphere and, in years it falls around then, the Biou festival procession; any weekend afternoon in summer is enough to find several cellars open for tastings without a reservation.