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Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Viognier?
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Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Viognier?

On beauty, art, literature, mustard, and wine.

Jason Wilson
Apr 22, 2025
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EVERYDAY DRINKING
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Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Viognier?
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A few years ago, Grey Poupon—yes, the mustard brand—released a white wine. This was at the beginning of our weird brand mashups era. Now, something like Sour Patch Kids Oreos or Hidden Valley Ranch ice cream or pink-lemonade flavored Kit Kats or Pepsi Maple Syrup Cola at IHOP are old hat. But in 2021, this was still a relatively new phenomenon.

I never got to taste Grey Poupon’s La Moutarde Vin 2020. I tried my best to procure a bottle but its production was extremely limited and I came away empty-handed. I did, however, relish the chance to ask the manager of my local wine store: “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon…wine?” He looked at me like I was crazy, and said, “What the hell is that? I don’t think we’d carry anything like that.” (Here’s the cultural reference, Gen Z.)

According to the brand (owned by Kraft Foods), La Moutarde Vin 2020 showed “bright hints of spice and pronounced citrus and floral characteristics, balanced by vibrant acidity.” The wine was infused with mustard seeds to “celebrate the white wine used in our iconic Dijon recipe.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of La Moutarde Vin is the actual wine they chose to bottle: a viognier from Napa Valley. While the ubiquitous jars of Dijon mustard have always read “Made With White Wine,” it never crossed my mind that this wine might be viognier. Now, in my mind, viognier will be forever linked with Grey Poupon. Which isn’t as strange as one might think.

If you’re old enough to remember the classic Grey Poupon ads, you’ll also remember when viognier was supposed to be “the next chardonnay.” That’s what they told us back in the 1990s, when I was a young man first stumbling into wine. I drank quite a bit of viognier back then. You couldn’t avoid it. Now? I almost never see it on a wine list, and I don’t know a single person that says, “Boy, I’d really love me some viognier tonight.” Viognier feels like a vestige of an era when Microsoft hired Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston to show people how to use Windows 95.

In the 1980s, only about 80 acres of viognier existed in the entire world. By the early 2000s, this had grown to more than 10,000 acres. California alone went from 25 acres of viognier in 1982 to more than 3,000 acres in 2010. Viognier even became the signature white grape of Virginia. “Viognier truly is the flavor, and I use the word advisedly, of the year,” said British wine critic Jancis Robinson in 2005.

By the end of the aughts, it seemed preposterous that anyone believed viognier would become so popular. “Did we really believe it would be the next chardonnay?” asked wine writer Jon Bonné, in 2010. “Of all the white Rhône-native grapes, it has the greatest tendency to go off the rails.” At the same time, critic Steve Heimoff called viognier “California’s heartbreak white grape,” and noted: “Just shows you shouldn’t believe everything the wine writers say.”

Viognier is divisive. Whenever I’ve served viognier, people love it or hate it. It’s big, floral, rich, and fruity. In the the encyclopedic Wine Grapes, Robinson and her co-authors, describe viognier as having a “hedonistic cocktail of aromas.” Viognier is often called “perfumed” or even “cologne-like.” A friend insisted one bottle smelled like Curious by Britney Spears. She added: “I’d wear it, but I don’t want to drink it.” The other reasons for its divisiveness are the distinct note of melon, and often a lack of acidity. I happen to love cantaloupe and honeydew, but I know a surprisingly high number of people who can’t stand it. As for the low acidity, this is likely why you don’t find many long-aged examples of viognier.

The ultimate expression of viognier comes from Condrieu, in the northern Rhône. Quirky, rare, strange, and beautiful, Condrieu is notoriously difficult to describe. Perhaps this is why Condrieu makes wine writers’ prose turn multiple shades of purple. They practically orgasm on the page.

Jay McInerney, in his book Bacchus & Me, writes that Condrieu “lingers like the song of Keats’ nightingale.” McInerney also claims that, when you smell the aromas, “you might imagine that you’ve been dropped into the Garden of Eden, or Kubla Khan’s Xanadu as described by the opiated Coleridge.” Further, he suggests that “if orchids had a scent, this might be it.” Finally, he tells us, “Drinking Condrieu can be like stepping inside a painting by the Tahitian-period Gauguin.” Jesus. Relax, McInerney.

Perhaps it’s fitting that McInerney, the celebrated novelist-turned-wine-writer, has been one of viognier’s greatest advocates. I’ve come to see viognier as akin to second-person narration in fiction writing. The most well-known of McInerney’s novels is Bright Lights, Big City, among the most famous second-person narratives in American literature: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.”

When the second-person works, it is immediate and offbeat and engaging. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work. Like many wannabe novelists of my era, I wrote terrible second-person faux-McInerney stories in my creative writing workshops. I believe a lot of New World viognier is too often derivative and poorly executed in the same way.

For a brief moment, in fact, I considered composing this piece entirely in the second person: You are not the kind of guy who would be drinking viognier in a place like this… Then I decided that was a very bad idea.

Condrieu vineyards (Vins-Rhône)

I’ve been thinking about all of this because, the other night, I bought and opened a bottle of viognier. Not just any viognier, but a 2022 Saint Cosme Condrieu, a ridiculously expensive weekday night wine. I buy this wine about once a year and it’s always special to taste.

I cannot tell you exactly why I love Saint Cosme Condrieu. It’s a big, indulgent, voluptuous, nectar-like white wine that is not generally my type. Even my tasting notes are rather banal: ripe and fleshy, aromas of melon, pineapple, and grilled lemon, flavors of honeydew, apricot, guava, spiced pear, creamy but with an underlying saltiness and hint of smoke that balances the low acidity. Looked at through the traditional wine lens, Condrieu generally gets good scores in the 90s, but few critics offer rave reviews. You’ll find it on wine lists, but few sommeliers champion Condrieu. It’s too expensive, not “ageworthy” enough, doesn’t check enough boxes for the natty wine crowd. I love it all the same.

In the world of wine, loving viognier can maybe be a little embarrassing. But that’s sort of how beauty works in the realm of culture. A while back, cultural critic Ted Gioia wrote an amazing meditation on the concept of “beauty” in art. In serious art circles, the idea of beauty is scoffed at, seen as an embarrassing notion. But Gioia asserts that beauty is actually dangerous to cultural institutions and gatekeepers (he calls them “theocracies of culture”) because it’s “the one thing that possesses the most potential for disruption and transgression in the whole cultural hierarchy.” As Gioia writes:

Nothing gets the rulers of institutional culture more worried than an intense passion beyond their control—that’s why they never even say the word beauty. That’s why they pretend it doesn’t exist. They have no authority over it, and never will. Their dominion ends at precisely the point where beauty begins. It really is in the eye of the beholder. Like falling in love, your attachment to the desired object requires no reasons or arguments.

Gioia suggests that in this moment, there is a grand rebellion against culture and toward individuals pursuing the objects they find beautiful, whatever that may be. About contemporary culture, he asserts: “It’s more like Tinder here than you realized.” In the world of wine, it’s probably even more like Feeld, to be honest. (At Everyday Drinking, there will be no shaming your wine kink.)

In the end, maybe it all comes back to the simple, banal “eye of the beholder.” Not to be the guy referencing Immanuel Kant twice in a month, but as he says in Critique of Judgement: “In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.” We’re all chasing our own obsessive, intimate relationship with the cultural objects we find beautiful. It’s no different with wine.

Once upon a time, I was stumped on what to pair with viognier. The typical suggestions are shellfish, curry, or saffron dishes. In her book Big Macs & Burgundy, Vanessa Price suggests mac & cheese. Pairing Food & Wine For Dummies recommends…steak? So it’s all over the map when it comes to viognier.

But ever since the Grey Poupon connection, now I know what the ideal pairing ingredient is for viognier: Dijon mustard. And I have a perfect, simple recipe below for pork chops slathered in a Dijon sauce.

Recipes, of course, are always solid second-person narration.

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