Legend places Jurançon at a royal christening: in 1553, in the castle of Pau, the lips of the newborn Henri IV were touched with garlic and a drop of the local wine. The story made it the christening wine of France, and in 1936 it stood among the country's first appellations.
Its sweetness owes nothing to rot. Petit and Gros Manseng hang on the vine into November, shrivelling in the dry mountain wind — the passerillage that concentrates pineapple, quince and spice over a wire of acidity no other sweet wine quite carries. Colette wrote that as a girl she had given herself to its "green and gold prince", and the phrase has followed the wine ever since.