The Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée is the most imitated idea in wine, the reason a French label names a place instead of a grape. It guarantees a great deal, but not quite the thing most people assume.

On a sunlit ribbon of vineyards between the Vosges mountains and the Rhine, France makes some of its most distinctive and age-worthy whites. To understand them is to understand a borderland that has belonged to two nations and kept the best of both.

Corsica produces some of the most distinctive and least understood wines in France, shaped by a history as rugged and independent as the island's own landscape.

The aromatic white grape that nearly vanished and the legendary appellation that saved it.