France has just become a country of red, white and now blue wine with the launch of a completely natural, turquoise-coloured variety of its favourite tipple, reports The Telegraph.
Blue Nun may be a total no-no in the land of Chateau Lafite but a wine sold "in the colours of the sea" is now on sale in Sète, a port city in the South of France.
The 100 per cent natural wine begins life as a traditional white but gets its blue tinge after being passed through a pulp of red grape skin thanks to the natural pigment anthocyanin.
It required stiff resolve, however, for blue wine to gain a foothold in famously traditional France, where wine is viewed as a cultural heritage and which resisted the lure of arriviste rosé for more than a century.
Gallic entrepreneur René Le Bail had to shift production to more laisser-faire Spain after his fellow countrymen refused to make his wine.
Now he is triumphantly selling the Almeira-made drink in his homeland but still dreams of convincing a local vineyard to take the plunge, grow his grapes, and make the wine officially French.
Some 35,000 bottles of Vindingo, a chardonnay selling for about 12 euros (£10.70 a bottle), are already on sale in Sète but it will soon be making inroads into the wine capital region of Bordeaux.