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Pasqua’s Hey French offers an innovative riposte to wine traditions

18 July 2024 By Michael Huband

Behind its playful branding, Hey French strikes a careful balance between ensuring high quality and subverting some common practices.

A bottle of Hey French sits on a blue table with an orange background. Hourglasses, a lemon and almonds are also on the table.

Standing out on the wine shelf is a key concern for many producers. Whether through prestigious iconography, celebrity endorsements or a novel brand identity, many producers are investing to be the first bottle to catch a consumer’s eye.

Hey French You Could Have Made This But You Didn’t, a premium white blend from Pasqua, takes a clearly playful approach to the challenge. Even from a glance, it brings a new identity to the wines of northern Italy. However, it also backs up its bold branding with unconventional choices in its winemaking.

You could read the teasingly titled multi-vintage blend as a riposte to some of the wine world’s received wisdom. Certainly in its branding, it combines the producer’s artistic leanings with an anti-establishment character. The colourful, rough brush strokes and splatters bring a sense of fun to the wine shelf. That should be unsurprising: the artist behind it, CB Hoyo, is a self-taught Cuban whose irreverent bio is a world away from self-important prestige branding.

Beyond the branding, however, how does Hey French rebel against convention? It certainly has a notable departure from the standard practices which, as implied in its name, are so associated with France. As a multi-vintage blend, it would be ineligible for the vast majority of Europe’s protected designations of origin. Indeed, the wine is labelled as an indicazione geografica tipica, a less specific designation than DOC or DOCG. The considered winemaking, however, means the wine still depicts its origin and its terroir.

The third edition (although not tied to a specific vintage, Pasqua makes clear the periodic changes to the blend) uses the 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016 vintages. The conditions ranged from heavy rains in 2016 to record-breaking heatwaves in 2019, but the vintages blend together for a harmonious and consistent wine.

That effort towards harmony and consistency is aided also by the winemaking. The grapes undergo broadly the same regimen each year, featuring partial malolactic fermentation, 10% barrique ageing, and six months in second use oak before transfer to stainless steel. There, the wines ready to make Hey French are protected until required.

Yet, despite the anti-establishment concept, it still speaks some of the language of conventional premium wines. Like so many of the world’s most prestigious wines, Hey French was designed to express the concept of terroir.

The wine is composed around the 4.5 hectare Monte Calvarina vineyard in the Soave region. Sitting on a southwest-facing slope that rises to 600 metres at its highest point, the vineyard is a fine location for white grapes to ripen while retaining their acidity. The soils, meanwhile, are a complex mix of basalt and calcareous compounds, which Pasqua believes lends the wine its minerality.

Vineyards in the Soave region, where Hey French is made. — The hills around Soave are well known for their premium potential.

Creating a multi-vintage blend was an effort to showcase the Garganega, Pinot Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc from the site at their very best. The blend allows their characteristics to shine through across several vintages, offering added complexity. Moreover, it ensures a consistent product not bound to a single capricious vintage.

In fact, far from denouncing all fine wine traditions, Hey French has much in common with one of France’s most prestigious regions. Like Champagne, it occupies a premium position on the market and can achieve both consistency and complexity through blending. The parallels are surprisingly neat: like some of the great Champagnes, Hey French uses multi-vintage blending to express single vineyard calcareous terroir.

So even if the wine’s name has a playful tone, this is not a branding-led knee-jerk rejection of all winemaking tradition. Hey French makes a complex argument, that wines can be fun but also premium and that you can choose when to follow tradition and when to break with it. Crucially, it demonstrates that those decisions are best made in the search of quality. It is a philosophy that other producers (French or otherwise) should give due attention.