What exactly is an Ardèche wine? It turns out it can be many things.
The Ardèche is a département (one of France’s 96 administrative regions) located in the Rhône that extends northwards to the top of St-Joseph and the more southerly villages of Condrieu, Cornas and St-Péray, too, are Ardèche wines.
So it might be wine from the granitic north. Or it might be wine that hails from the calcareous south, as the département encapsulates some of the southern Rhône too. Most of the vast IGP Ardèche is limestone mountains, the landscape frequently gouged by deep river gorges cut jaggedly like a knife through sourdough bread, with vineyards nestled in the valleys.