On day four of our journey, we take you to the southernmost wine region of France: Corsica. Kermit says that when he first visited the island in 1980:

I remember looking down from the airplane window seeing alpine forest and lakes and thinking, uh oh, I got on the wrong plane. Then suddenly I was looking down into the beautiful waters of the Mediterranean. I was with Jean-Marie Peyraud from Domaine Tempier. His father helped research and define the wine appellations of Corsica back in the sixties, so we arrived armed with Lucien Peyraud’s leads.

It was work, dangerous, unsatisfying work. Dirt roads were carved into mountain sides, and there were no barriers between the car and a long plummeting dunk in the ocean. Wine after wine was uninspiring plonk, most of them cooked before they could be put into bottle. Then, our final day, our last, late-at-night appointment, we poked our tired beaks into glasses of, of all things, a white wine. Jean-Marie and I looked up at each other, eyes sparkling—we knew we’d found a rare gem.

In the decades since, we’ve discovered many more gems from every corner of the island. The Niellucciu grape reigns in the north, where it can either yield aromatic and complex single-variety reds (like Muriel Giudicelli’s Patrimonio Rouge) or be blended into delicious rosés like Domaine Maestracci’s, packed with flavors of berries, granite, and wild herbs. On your way down south, Sciaccarellu becomes more prominent, producing some of France’s most exuberant and distinctive wines, like Abbatucci’s Faustine rosé. Finally, we can’t leave Corsica without trying a blend of the island’s two great white grapes: Vermentinu and Biancu Gentile. Yves Leccia’s Île de Beauté blanc and Antoine Arena’s Vin de France represent some of the finest examples of this marriage.