One of the many reasons I love wine is that I’ll be going about my day, secretly confident that I’ve tasted or at least read about every type of wine there is, and then bam. A bus will come roaring down the boulevard of wine experience and take my complacent ass out.

This happened to me yesterday as I was snacking at a gourmet food court in a mall (only in San Francisco). I spotted on the wine list a sparkler I’d never heard of before, and to hide my ignorance and impress my smart friends I made a joke: “Look, they’ve got Certain Botox on the wine list.”

Really, the list said “Bottex Cerdon, $8/glass.” Discover, as we did, one of the world’s most amusing unknown wines by reading more here:

Turns out, as the waiter told us breathlessly, the Bottex Cerdon is a really tasty sparkling wine from France, made of gamay. I recognized the main ingredient of Beaujolais, so I asked incredulously if it were red. “No! Rosé!” he erupted, “You have to try it. It’s fun, it’s fruity, and it goes great with our food,” which happened to be Vietnamese fusion.

There was no ordering anything else. So three glasses of a deeply pink, pettilant liquid appeared on our table. We tasted. We reared back. Fun, yes, and fruity too. Full of strawberry and cranberry flavors. But definitely off-dry. I would have opposed the sweet temptations of Certain Botox until I remembered being rejuvenated by a red Lambrusco, another fun and inexpensive bubbly this time from Italy, by the pool on a hot day years ago.

The full name of the wine is Bugey-Cerdon, which is the area (Bugey) in Savoie and the village (Cerdon) where winemakers practice the “méthode ancestrale” of letting their pink wines ferment a second time in the bottle. This process leads to the bubbles. (Bugey, as the wine merchant Kermit Lynch points out, is where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas waited out the Occupation during World War II.) The winery is Patrick Bottex, and this particular bottling “La Cueille” retails for about $20.