Definition: piquette

In popular parlance, piquette refers to a mediocre, acidic wine. But in reality, it is a drink in its own right, called Lora by the Romans. It was obtained by macerating the marc in water. It is in fact a sub-process of winemaking that does not contain alcohol.
Its production is prohibited in France. It seems that monks introduced this term to refer to bad wine in popular language.
Piquette cannot be a bad wine because it is not a wine.
Authorised in certain European Union countries, it must be reserved exclusively for "distillation or family consumption by individual winegrowers.
What awful piquette! Piquette is a by-product of wine-making, well known to distillers, which was used for fraud in ancient times: it consisted of mixing the marc with more or less sweetened water and putting it back into fermentation. The distiller extracts the sugars from the fresh marc by washing it, ferments it, and distils the piquette to recover the alcohol.