Exploring the Wines of Savoie Curtesy of the Local Pétanque Club

Oct 25, 2025

5 min read

Updated: Oct 6

When people daydream about a year sabbatical in France, they usually don’t picture themselves in the Alps.

Paris, yes. The cafés, the grand boulevards, and the monuments. Or maybe the Côte d’Azur.

Now, if you’re going to France specifically to learn about wine, Haute-Savoie probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind. It’s high, it’s Alpine, and it’s much better known for mountains, lakes and skiing than wine.

We, however, ended up in the Alps. Well. Almost. We were closer to Grenoble, but let’s not let geography get in the way of a good story.

My husband spent a season at Domaine Dupraz in Savoie, working long days in the vineyards, coming home tired and obsessed with the mountains.

One day, he stopped to take in the view and, in his charmingly limited French, told the winemaker, Maxime: “Wow. What an absolutely gorgeous view you get to enjoy every day!”

Maxime looked at him, puzzled, and replied in his equally charmingly limited English:“These are just some peaks.”

Just some peaks.

Because, yes, to Maxime they were just the mountains. He sees them every day. They’re there when he starts work, there when he goes home. Since he was a kid.

Just some peaks. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over that.

Domaine Dupraz

Domaine Dupraz is a family-run estate in the Reposoir area of Apremont, with vines climbing steep hillsides at around 350 to 450 metres. The Dupraz family has been here since 1880, passed from father to son, and the estate has been certified organic since 2021.

They make Altesse and Mondeuse, but Jacquère is really the heart of the place. The winemaker calls it a “mirror of the terroir”, which sounds a little grand until you’ve actually stood there and looked around.

"some peaks" | Photo credit: Domaine Dupraz, Apremont, Savoie, France

Bastille Day, Closed France and the Pétanque Club

That year, when my husband was working in Apremont, July 14, Bastille Day, fell on a Saturday. You know, the French national holiday when everyone celebrates liberté, égalité, fraternité.

We thought it would be a perfect day for a little adventure, just the two of us. The kids were off in Hungary with friends, and we’d already been in France for a few months, so naturally, we thought we knew what we were doing.

The car was full of gas, we had snacks packed, and off we went into the mountains.

Of course, everything was closed.

Still, Chignin was beautiful. The village sits at the foot of the Bauges Mountains, surrounded by vineyards and those enormous Alpine views that make you almost forget, for a moment, that you’re hungry and nothing is open.

Almost.

But as luck would have it, we came across a group of gentlemen in the middle of their Bastille Day celebrations. They were the local pétanque club - oui, oui, men throwing metal balls around with the sort of concentration you’d expect from people negotiating a peace treaty.

They welcomed us as if we were old friends. We were a little surprised, actually. Coming from a big city, we were used to people being rather more reserved with strangers. Here, apparently, you could just wander into a village pétanque game and be welcomed into the group.

And then came the wine.

Local wine. Quite a lot of it, actually.

Mais oui, who needs dinner when there’s wine in a park?

Thanks to the boules club, I ended up tasting several local wines. It turned out to be a much better introduction to Savoie than the carefully planned wine education I had imagined beforehand.

And naturally, we took a family photo to commemorate the day, because apparently nothing says “romantic getaway” quite like an impromptu wine party with a bunch of friendly French guys playing pétanque.

So, What Exactly Were We Drinking?

Altesse, Jacquère, Mondeuse and Persan sound less like grape varieties and more like the cast of a Belle Époque cabaret. You can almost hear the accordion.

These are grapes that belong to the landscape: the mountains, the steep vineyards, the cool Alpine climate. The y are crisp, lively whites, and reds that can be surprisingly light on their feet, and a whole collection of local varieties that seem to have completely ignored the international wine industry’s memo about becoming famous. Good.

Jacquère

Jacquère is probably the grape that best represents the Savoie I remember. Light white, fresh, crisp and very easy to drink. Not a lot of fuss.

You’ll find it in wines from Apremont and Abymes, often with citrus, green apple and that clean, almost stony freshness you want from an Alpine white.

Altesse or Roussette

There’s more weight here with these whites. More texture. You can get honey, nuts, ripe fruit and sometimes something a little exotic.

Roussanne or Bergeron in Savoie

Another white. Roussanne is a Rhône grape, but in Savoie it’s traditionally known as Bergeron.

Chignin-Bergeron can be quite a different animal from Jacquère, richer, more textured, with stone fruit, floral notes and that slightly waxy quality.

Chasselas

Chasselas - particularly around the French side of Lake Geneva, it’s delicate and floral white, usually quieter than some of the other Savoie whites.

I know Chasselas from Switzerland, so finding it here felt a little like running into an old acquaintance in a completely different neighbourhood.

Mondeuse

Mondeuse is the red grape I most associate with Savoie. It makes dark, peppery wines.

It doesn’t taste like Burgundy, and it certainly doesn’t taste like Northern Rhône Syrah. I have nothing against either of those wines - au contraire! But I don’t need Mondeuse pretending to be something else than the Alpine red.

And there are also Gamay makes lighter, fruitier reds, and Persan, one of those old varieties that has started to make a bit of a comeback.

The Appellations

Savoie wine can appear under several appellations and crus, including Vin de Savoie, Apremont, Abymes, Chignin-Bergeron, Arbin and Roussette de Savoie. There is also Crémant de Savoie for sparkling wines.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, particularly if you're trying to understand the region from a Calgary wine shelf rather than standing in a vineyard looking at the mountains.

But that's also part of the fun.

Savoie isn't a region where you can walk into a wine shop and casually choose from an enormous wall of familiar labels. Much of the wine is consumed close to home — by locals, by skiers, by people who have spent the day in the mountains and have sensibly decided that wine is part of the recovery process.

I fully support this logic.

The result is that Savoie can feel strangely elusive once you leave the Alps.

And that's a shame.

Finding Savoie Wines in Calgary

In Calgary, I’d start with the independent wine shops. Metrovino Fine Wines and Market Wines are good places to look if you’re after the less obvious French bottles.

Sometimes the best wine education is the one you never planned on having. Ours just happened to involve a metal ball, a village park, a bunch of French guys and no dinner whatsoever. Santé!