“The word is out on blouge,” says Meri Lugo, the managing partner of Domestique, a natural wine shop in Washington, D.C. “One of our regulars recently told us that blouge is going to be his wine of the summer.”
A subcategory of chillable reds, blouge wines are made by cofermenting red and white wine grapes. The resulting bottles are lighter, brighter, and lower in alcohol than heavyweights such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Barolo. Blouge tends to be relatively affordable, too. You can drink it unaccompanied or alongside a range of foods including cheeseboards, tinned fish, spicy noodles, and pretty much anything that comes off the grill at a cookout.
Don’t be misled by the goofy-sounding name. A portmanteau of the French words for white (blanc) and red (rouge), blouge isn’t some market-researched contrivance. The style has been around for generations and is poised to withstand historic economic, ecological, and social headwinds.
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Seasons change and fashion is fleeting, but blouge is in it for the long haul.
“It’s important to remember that it’s part of traditional winemaking practices,” says Jenny Lefcourt, owner and president of New York-based importer Jenny & François Selections. Even if you find the name “gimmicky,” she says, blouge “harkens back to something that’s always been.”
In previous eras, grape growers would cultivate an array of varieties in the same plot. Some would use their fruit to make field blends like palhete, Portugal’s answer to blouge, with roots dating to the 12th century.
In more recent millenia—and right up to the present—winemakers in France’s Southern Rhône either blend or coferment red and white grapes to maintain balanced fruit, acidity, and tannins in world-famous wines like Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Most Champagne and Chianti bottles contain a blend of red and white wines, too.
Cofermenting entails some degree of variability, so blouge winemaking is particularly suited to the unpredictability of modern climates. “You have to be adaptable if you’re dependent on the weather for how you’re making your living,” Lefcourt says.
For instance, let’s say that you’re making wine in the south of France, and your red wine grapes ripen way too quickly. If you coferment them with high-acid, lower-alcohol white grapes, you might be able to keep the wine fresh and not-too-boozy.
The resulting blouge bottles align with all sorts of trending topics, including consumer preferences for young, low-alcohol wines served cold and with little fanfare.
Sales speak for themselves: In 2023, Aubert & Mathieu, a label in France’s Languedoc, introduced a blouge wine called Boogie Woogie. Last year, the winery sold 20,000 bottles, a 40% increase over 2024, cofounder Anthony Aubert told The Economist.
There are social factors at work, too. “La vie en blouge” occupies a sweet spot at the intersection of cool and approachable that can be hard to find in the wine world.
“It injects a bit of playfulness and irreverence in a space that can feel really intimidating and rules-laden,” says Lugo. “To have this made-up word that denotes something delicious and fun and whimsical, people are just drawn to it.”
After all, wine is comically complicated. If you want to sip something crisp and restorative after a long day, it’s a lot easier to say “Do you have any blouge-style wines?” than to navigate intricate geographic classification systems or naming conventions. Like rosé and orange wine, blouge is a category unto itself.
“It connotes or communicates a vibe, a mood, a feeling about a wine that can be really effective, versus ‘I’m looking for a co-ferment of a red and white,’” says Lugo. With all the drama outside the bar and bottle shop, what could be more refreshing than that?
