Mondeuse is the mountain Syrah — dark, peppery, violet-edged, grown on steep terraces at Arbin and Saint-Jean-de-la-Porte where the Combe de Savoie catches the sun. Before phylloxera, Savoie was a red-wine land and Mondeuse its pride, planted across slopes that fed the valley towns and the passes into Switzerland and Italy.
The twentieth century nearly erased it. Replanting after the louse favoured easier grapes, and the ski resorts' thirst for light whites pushed the old red to the margins, hectare by hectare. Its rescue came late: old vines kept by stubborn families, and a new generation of growers who bottled Mondeuse on its own terms and put the mountain red back on serious lists.