Dining on the Wine Trail: Picamandil, Puissalicon
Frédéric Lamboeuf's spacious wine canteen north of Béziers features fresh-baked bread from his wife Rebecca's La Fornada bakery, along with a wide and omnivorous selection of Languedoc natural wines.
I’m afraid I missed the golden age of natural wine dining around Béziers and the Faugères appellation. I first visited the late Raimond Le Coq’s La Cave Saint Martin in nearby Roquebrun in 2019 - a year before his passing, but a week after he sold the storied natural wine address to indifferent new ownership. And I never got the chance to visit Romain Henry Niess’ beloved Béziers bistrot Pas Comme Les Autres, which closed in 2020.
Helping alleviate the near-vacuum of natural wine dining in the region, since 2016, is Frédéric Lamboeuf’s Picamandil, a versatile and airy wine bar, wine shop, and épicierie in the picturesque 12th-century village of Puissalicon. It’s a maximum-accessibility, minimum-service sort of space, an easygoing oasis of locavore snacks and (largely) natural wine.
Lamboeuf’s Welsh wife Rebecca is a baker who produces Nature et Progrès bread next-door as La Fornada. With a menu limited to counter-service of unpretentious Spanish bar snacks - pan con tomate, diverse fried croquetas, sardines, and so forth - Picamandil’s slender offering belies its name, which is obscure Occitan slang for “the person who eats the most at table.” If you find yourself at Picamandil for the sort of apéro that replaces dinner, as I did with the Clos Fantine harvest team on the day we finished for the season, consider a tall order of various small plates, and then triple it.
In a convenient labor-saving scheme, Picamandil’s lunch offering consists of a mixed plate composed of tiny bits of its dinnertime offering. It can make you feel as if you’ve just sat down after helping yourself to the hors d’oeuvres at a wedding. But it does the job. (The fry quality is consistently high throughout.)
Lamboeuf’s cellar is more abundant. Originally from Corbières, he formerly worked in sales for mass-biodynamic giant Gerard Bertrand. Yet his hundreds-strong wine selection at Picamandil is influenced by an abiding sympathy for real natural wine and craft beer.
One finds among the thronged shelves the wines of local icons like Jeff Coutelou, Axel Prüfer, Remi Poujol, and Clos Fantine, along with those of younger vignerons like Joe Jefferies, Sybil Baldassarre, and Alexandre Durand - all organized by village. Welcome additions from outside the region include the wines of Stéphane Tissot, the Brand Brothers, and Partida Creus.
Some might find it annoying to sift through almost-natural wines and just-organic wines to find actual natural wines at Picamandil. But given the establishment’s size and location, I can’t blame Lamboeuf for prioritizing accessibility over purity.
With two large terrace areas as well as indoor dining, it would require a team of dedicated and very patient wine-savvy servers to explain natural wine to each table, even on a calm night. Even finding one such server is a heavy lift in major urban centers, let alone Puissalicon, a pretty Béziers satellite village that, at least to judge from the lunch crowd in September, is a second-home to a lot of retired Brits and northern Europeans. (Why not stock the well-made, highly oenological organic wines of say, Domaine de Cebene, if it means one gets to avoid confrontations about entrapped CO2 and volatility with British retirees?)
At Picamandil, it’s best to go in knowing the wine you wish to drink. On my first visit, none of the three natural pet’-nat’s I brought to the counter were available chilled, so the server suggested an unfamiliar wine, which proved thoroughly neutered by a generous sulfitage. (What is the world coming to, when it is no longer safe to order pet’-nat’? When a pet’-nat’ is not natural, is it merely a pet’?)
I left nothing to chance when I returned for lunch, zeroing in on the end of a bottle of Jeff Coutelou’s durable and immaculate “OW,” a fragrant, umeboshi-toned maceration of muscat d’Alexandrie that, for me, ranks as one of France’s greatest orange wines. Somewhat rare in Paris; available by-the-glass at Picamandil.
“Here in the Languedoc there’s a culture of producing wine, but there’s almost no culture of consuming wine,” Lamboeuf observed, in the course of a chat on my way out the door. “When I went to the banks for a loan to open this place, they all looked at me like I was crazy.”
His instincts have been confirmed, he says, by the number of families who come from the surrounding villages to dine and purchase wine.
“There’s a whole generation of younger people, who decide they don’t want to live in the city, and who move to towns around here,” he says. “Of course they still want somewhere to go out at night and drink wine.”
Picamandil
39 Av. de Béziers3
4480 PUISSALICON
Tel: +33 6 27 29 17 88
Open from Tuesday to Saturday from 9:00AM to midnight.
FURTHER READING
A 2016 article on Picamandil by one of its beer suppliers, La Gorge Fraiche.
Le Fooding’s enthusiastic review of Picamandil calls Fred and Rebecca “a couple of golden sorcerers” who run “the country’s most inclusive” wine shop-épicerie.