Fendant is Switzerland in a glass: Chasselas grown in the Valais, on sun-baked terraces held up by dry-stone walls in the high valley of the Rhône. The bisses — the centuries-old irrigation channels that carry glacier water along the cliff faces to the vines — are a monument in their own right. The name is tactile: a grape that splits (fendre) cleanly under the thumb instead of crushing.
The wine's virtue is its transparency. Chasselas carries little aroma of its own, so Fendant tastes of its parcel — lake stone here, flint there, a faint natural spritz throughout — and the Valaisans read their slopes through it. Beyond the raclette table it rarely travels; at it, nothing else is imaginable.