Vindigo is filtered through a pulp of red grape skins to give the wine a turquoise hue

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Germans gave the world Blue Nun and now Spanish wine makers have begun selling the French the cleverly named Vindigo, marketed as 100% natural despite its bizarre turquoise hue.

Vindigo is a 100% chardonnay wine made in Almería in Andalucia, Spain. According to the makers, it owes its strange colour to the wine being subsequently filtered through a pulp of red grape skins containing anthocyanins (from the Greek anthos – flower – and kyaneos – dark blue). The natural substance is found in blueberries and raspberries as well as black soybeans and black and red grapes.

René Le Bail, a French businessman who is selling Vindigo from his HQ in Sète, a port in southeast France, described the drink as an ideal “summer aperitif”.

“On the beach or by the swimming pool – it’s 11% which means it’s not a super strong wine. It has a fruity taste, there’s cherry, passion fruit and blackberry. It’s a festive wine,” Le Bail said.

The wine has been priced between €12-€18 but it is currently only available in Sète.

He has already ordered 35,000 bottles to see if the French will adopt the new wine or it if will be a short-lived novelty.

Its success will not be guaranteed in a country where wine, normally red, white or rosé, has been an integral part of the culture.

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Nor is Vindigo the first blue wine. In 2016, the small Spanish startup Gïk, launched by six young entrepreneurs, marketed what they claimed was the world’s first blue wine, as part of their collaboration with the University of the Basque Country.

An initial attempt to sell it in French supermarkets, however, fell foul of the country’s labelling regulations: the bottles were labelled as “vin bleu” – a designation not recognised among EU-agreed wine categories.

Gïk was therefore removed from supermarket shelves after just three days. But with updated labelling as a “wine-based alcohol drink” Gïk Blue remains available to buy online and was featured in the specialist magazine Decanter in 2016. Decanter did not say what it thought of the wine.

• This article was amended on 3 August 2018. An earlier version said that Gïk Blue was removed from supermarkets because its labelling was in English. This has been corrected.