Lockdowns inevitably alter your relationship with time, and by July 2020 in Singapore, the hours stretching across an empty apartment required deliberate engineering to fill. Cooking shifted from a necessary daily utility into a mechanism for maintaining sanity. The project for this particular evening was Hasselback potatoes — a technique that involves slicing a potato into thin, accordion-like leaves without cutting all the way through the base, and then methodically wedging strips of bacon into the narrow gaps. It is an exercise in tedious, high-effort peasant food that makes zero sense on a normal Tuesday, but makes perfect sense when you are legally prohibited from leaving your neighbourhood. It was a labor-intensive, fat-heavy dish that demanded a serious red to cut through it.
I had picked up the wine earlier from Wine Connection, making the selection based entirely on the physical packaging. The bottle was made of massively heavy, thick glass, stamped with a label reading Le Grand Méchant Loup — The Big Bad Wolf. Usually, a bottle this heavy with a name this theatrical is a warning sign — a physical overcompensation for a lack of structure in the wine itself. But lockdown suspended normal consumer logic, and the name had already triggered an associative leap in my head. It reminded me of Sergei Prokofiev's symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf — specifically the 1978 RCA recording narrated by David Bowie. It was a bizarre cultural fragment surfacing in the middle of a pandemic, and it was reason enough to buy the bottle.
The winery behind the theatrics is Vignobles Vellas. Under the direction of Nicolas Vellas — the family figure who aggressively expanded the estate's footprint and modernised its marketing — the house has leaned heavily into these kinds of bold, conceptually driven cuvées. But beneath the marketing, the wine is anchored in a very serious address. Pic Saint-Loup is one of the few appellations in the Languedoc where the name actually explains something useful. The AOP — Appellation d'Origine Protégée — sits in the northern reaches of the region, just above Montpellier, where the first foothills of the Cévennes mountains begin to interrupt the flat, sun-baked logic of the southern plains. That interruption is the whole point: cool air descending from the peaks at night functions as a natural brake on the Mediterranean heat, slowing ripening and preserving acidity in grapes that would otherwise bake flat on lower-lying sites. The terroir is well-draining limestone — poor enough to stress the vines, structured enough to give the wines a mineral backbone that the broader Languedoc rarely delivers. The 2018 vintage was warm and generous without the extreme heat spikes that flatten concentration; the Cévennes influence kept the nights cool enough to maintain tension through a long, even ripening season.
The wine is a classic southern French assembly of Syrah, Grenache Noir, and Mourvèdre. Syrah drives the aromatic profile with dark fruit and savoury spice, while Mourvèdre — a thick-skinned variety that defines the structure of many northern Languedoc reds — provides the necessary structural grip. To manage that raw material, the élevage — the post-fermentation maturation period in the cellar — is clearly managed to polish rather than preserve rusticity. The time the wine spends resting in a combination of concrete and oak before bottling has effectively rounded the tannins into a dense, velvety texture. It is a broad-shouldered, bone-dry wine, but the structural execution keeps it from feeling clumsy or jammy.
Which brings us back to the Hasselback potatoes. Pairing a meticulously crafted, structured Languedoc red with bacon-stuffed potatoes topped with roasted garlic and chives is, on paper, a profound mismatch of culinary registers. Yet it was a weird time for weird experiments, and functionally, the pairing made complete sense. The sheer volume of rendered pork fat and roasted starch required a wine with enough tannin to scrape the palate clean and enough ripe dark fruit to stand up to the heavy smoke of the bacon. The Big Bad Wolf managed that without difficulty. It felt, sitting there alone with the potatoes and the heavy glass bottle, like entirely appropriate company for a pandemic Tuesday.
Pairs well with
