TROIS AMIS BLANC, $33

Alas, like most of us, the closest you will ever get to a ménage à trois is a lusty and satisfying wine from Pelican Ranch called Trois Amis (three friends). Pardon the stretch, but there aren’t many excuses to use the French term for “three people in a household” in a wine article. Why is the term sexy in French and bland in English?  

 However, this wine does have many of the tactile, almost raunchy characteristics we find alluring in the other: full body, complexity, a sequestered aspect (like: how in the hell did they make this?). It costs the same as a cheap date, albeit with one person. It’s money well and safely spent.

Crafting a great wine from one grape variety is baffling enough, but how does one successfully blend three, especially three varieties  of such enormously opposite  characteristics? The Trois Amis is made up of 20 percent Viognier (Vee-oh-nn-yay), a racy French grape hailing from Northern Rhône. Its popularity has exploded in the last 15 years; more is now grown in California than in France, though more does not necessarily mean a finer product.  There are some wonderful single-grape Viogniers around, but there are also a lot of clumsy losers. The wine should be dry and tight, not sweet and sloppy. With its lithe and serpentine figure, we will call the Viognier “The  Enticer” to our ménage.

Two legs of our wine affair are supported by grapes less well known in California, but heavily used in the Rhône Valley: 40 percent of the Three Friends is Marsanne and 40 percent Rousanne. Because of their striking opposites they are often found in the same bed, er, that is, same bottle. The Marsanne is youthful and acid–shy, whereas the Rousanne is tart and  stridently acidic  and thus grows more interesting with time. The Marsanne is an early fader whereas the Rousanne is in it for the long haul. You begin to see how these three friends work so well together. Remember where we started. The Viognier is the spirit, and the lean muscle of these three grapes needs to stay wrapped together.

People who write of wine would be helpless without the analogies of sex. In fact wine and sex are far more than a time-honored analogy; they are perfect mates. Picture the cloning of root stocks, the inner twining of vines and the marriages of fruits and acids. Conclusions are as inescapable as dew on the brow, sweat on the palm, a rush on the palate.  

Fine wines are like fine people. If balanced, they age well. Passion and obsession are balanced by compassion and restraint. Where once fools rushed in, wisdom steers one on a wider path around threesomes (except of course in a wine bottle, or aces in a poker hand, or BLT’s, or maybe a bedtime story like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”  “Oh yes, yes that’s joost riiiiiight.”).

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