vin de paille is French for ‘straw wine’ (Strohwein in German), a small group of necessarily expensive but often quite delicious, long-lived, sweet white wines. These are essentially a subgroup of dried-grape wines made from grapes dried on straw mats. Cyrus redding’s catalogue of wines produced in the early 19th century makes it clear that vins de paille were much more common then and, although he was most enthusiastic about ‘Ermitage-paille’ (from hermitage vines), he found vins de paille in jura, alsace, and Corrèze. At about the same time some producers in Rust in austria were also using the technique.
