Jurassian Spark

Jurassian spark With historic grapes and age-old techniques, the resurgence of serious viticulture in the Jura has put the French region on the tips of oenophiles’ tongues across the globe.

Jeffrey T Iverson samples the results Photographs by Denis Dalmasso 128

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Jurassian spark With historic grapes and age-old techniques, the resurgence of serious viticulture in the Jura has put the French region on the tips of oenophiles’ tongues across the globe.

Jeffrey T Iverson samples the results Photographs by Denis Dalmasso 128

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Opposite: Domaine de la Tournelle co-owners Pascal and Evelyne Clairet at the charming terrace of their Le Bistrot de la Tournelle in Arbois; top row from left: Guillaume d’Angerville and (right) François Duvivier – co-owners of Domaine du Pélican in Montigny-lès-Arsures; Emmanuelle Perraut, cellar master at Domaine de la Pinte, poses proudly in front of her casks; middle row from left: the softly sloping vineyards at Domaine Ganevat and (centre) owner Jean-François Ganevat; a pastoral panorama at Château-Chalon; bottom row from left: young vintner Renaud Bruyère and (centre) his Pupillin vines; Stéphane Tissot shows off the day’s harvest

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The vines and village of Château-Chalon

WHEN IN JURA Stay at the Château de Germigney (chateaudegermigney. com), the former hunting pavilion of the Marquis de Germigney and now an opulent Relais & Château hotel just north of Arbois, or experience the village charms of Arbois with a night at the Closerie les Capucines (closerielescapucines.com), an elegantly renovated, 17thcentury convent. Tour the region’s many great wineries, and taste its specialities: rich cheeses like Comté, Morbier and Mont d’Or; Bresse Chicken; pine-smoked sausages; morel and cep mushrooms; river trout and omble-chevalier freshwater salmon. Visit Edouard Hirsinger in Arbois (chocolathirsinger.com), one of France’s greatest chocolatiers. Dine at chef Pierre Basso Moro’s Michelin-starred table at Château de Germigney, or experience Jean-Paul Jeunet’s contemporary vision of Jurassian terroir at his magnificent two-Michelin-star restaurant (jeanpauljeunet. com) in the heart of Arbois.

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uillaume d’Angerville, owner of the revered Burgundy estate Domaine Marquis d’Angerville, has a tradition he enjoys at the historic Paris restaurant Taillevent. Each visit, the sommelier chooses a new wine from anywhere except Burgundy for him to blind-taste. Dining there one day, d’Angerville raised a glass to his lips and, to his surprise, smelled home – a skillfully vinified chardonnay from a grand terroir. “You forgot the rule, you brought me a wine from Burgundy,” he gently chastised the sommelier.

Nonplussed, the sommelier smiled, “I am afraid you’re wrong.” The chardonnay, with its floral nose and long, crystalline finish, was the 2005 single-vineyard bottling Les Bruyères from Domaine André et Mireille Tissot in … the Jura, a tiny backwater hidden between Burgundy and the Swiss border. D’Angerville was floored. And so it was that in 2012 he launched the d’Angerville family’s first venture outside the Côte de Beaune in six generations – Domaine du Pélican (domainedangerville.fr), ten hectares of biodynamically farmed vines around Arbois, capital of the Jura winemaking region.

Today, d’Angerville’s arrival comes amid myriad signs that, after decades of obscurity, the Jura is becoming a bastion for some of the most forward-looking winemakers in France.

There, organic and biodynamic viticulture and artisanal, low-sulpher winemaking aren’t just

fads, but are being used with deliberation and passion to draw excellence and authenticity from the fossil-rich soils. Their wines have become terribly à la mode in wine bars and restaurants from New York to Copenhagen (where Mads Kleppe, sommelier of the world’s top restaurant, Noma, has perhaps the largest selection of Jura wines of any restaurant outside France). “You find such great diversity in the soils and micro-climates, and in the styles of wines,” Kleppe enthuses. “The red wines can be exceptional, and the whites can be everything from light, fresh and fruit-driven to extremely complex, deep, concentrated … they have both richness and elegance, and this salty minerality that is really something I look for.”

Emmanuelle Perraut, cellar master of Domaine de la Pinte (lapinte.fr), a first-rate 34ha organic Arbois estate, is pleasantly confounded that France’s smallest viticultural region is creating such to-do. “There really is a craze for the wines of the Jura,” she says. “It’s a level of demand that’s never really existed before.” Or, at least, not in a century. In the late 1800s, the Jura boasted 20,000 hectares under vine, its wines celebrated by Napoleon III and the gastronome Curnonsky. But then phylloxera and two world wars transfigured the region, diminishing vineyards to only 2,000 hectares and condemning it to isolation.

When Pascal and Evelyne Clairet founded Domaine de la Tournelle (domainedelatournelle. com) with eight hectares in 1994, having cellars in central Arbois was an economic imperative, so local was the market for Jura wines. “When

HOW TO GO Around 80km east of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or and almost as close to Geneva, the Jura vineyard region is a breathtaking landscape of mountain foothills, rivers and waterfalls, stretching 80km north to south across the French fringes of the Swiss Alps. With the Jura’s surprising wines entering the zeitgeist today, this long overlooked region is worth rediscovering: for its pristine nature, its Unesco world heritage sites, like the 18th-century Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s architectural masterpiece; and its charming hilltop towns like Château-Chalon, where you can visit a winery such as Domaine Macle (+33 3 84 44 98 89), and discover why the Belle Èpoque gastronome Curnonsky counted the wine of this tiny village among the five best white wines in the world.

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I bought this house at the heart of the village in 1995, 80% of our wine was sold right here,” says Pascal Clairet. Today, his vaulted Cistercian cellars are lovely to visit, but hardly essential – nearly 80 per cent of Clairet’s clientele is now outside the region, from palace hotels, like Le Meurice in Paris, to the most avant-garde restaurants in the world, like Noma. It’s a hard-fought victory Clairet shares with a handful of other pioneers.

“People like us, Stéphane Tissot, Pierre Overnoy and Emmanuel Houillon, and JeanFrançois Ganevat have been travelling around since the early 2000s trying to raise awareness about the Jura,” he says. “Today, we’re finally being heard.”

They got noticed in large part by reviving the region’s numerous wine styles: dry white wines (from chardonnay and savagnin) and red (from pinot noir, trousseau and poulsard/ ploussard), sherry-like vin jaune, sparkling Crémant du Jura, sweet Vin de Paille and fortified Macvin wines. Following visionaries like Overnoy of Domaine Pierre Overnoy/ Emmanuel Houillon ( +33 3 84 66 24 27) – who adopted organic viticulture in the 1960s – these pioneers converted to organics, cut yields to half the regional average, and embraced patient, artisanal, Burgundyinspired cellar methods.

Clairet’s revolution started with savagnin, the grape traditionally used to make vin jaune, whose nutty, oxidative character delights connoisseurs but can repel the uninitiated.

Aged in barrels for six years, the wine is allowed to partially evaporate and develops a protective layer of yeast. In 1994, though, Clairet topped up his barrels in Burgundy fashion. “Only three of us in the whole region were vinifying savagnin like that,” he recalls.

“People thought we were crazy.” Yet boasting a nose of lime blossom and wild rose, this non-oxidative style, which Clairet dubbed Fleur de Savagnin, reconfirmed savagnin’s ampelographic cousinhood with the intensely aromatic Gewürztraminer grape of Alsace.

When Stéphane Tissot took over his family’s 30ha estate Domaine André et Mireille Tissot (stephane-tissot.com) in 1999, he brought New World innovative spirit to the Jura, having worked in Australia and South Africa following winemaking studies in Beaune. He created an astounding range of wines, from his PMG cuvée (an extreme version of Vin de Paille, made from ripe grapes dried several months before pressing, with a staggering residual sugar concentration of 450g/litre – levels on par with the ultra-rare Essencia wines of Tokaji) to his creamy, polished Crémant du Jura “Indigène”, which Robert Parker called “one the finest sparkling wines I have ever tasted outside of Champagne”.

Jean-François Ganevat also returned to the Jura in 1999, determined to revive his father’s 10ha estate Domaine Ganevat (+33 3 84 25 02 CONTACT PLATINUM CARD SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS

after ten years working as a cellar master in Chassagne-Montrachet. Alain Labet of Domaine Labet (+33 3 84 25 11 13) had just created the Jura’s first non-oxidative chardonnays, and soon Ganevat was showing the world that with meticulous organic vineyard work and Burgundian savoir-faire in the cellar, Jura winemakers can yield world-class chardonnays. For remarkable single-vineyard chardonnays like Les Chalasses, Wine Advocate’s David Schildknecht named him “the most accomplished French vigneron of whom most of my readers have never heard”.

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oday, Ganevat can’t keep up with demand. And, remarkably, neither can many young, just-launched winemakers. “We’re benefiting from this great dynamic in the Jura,” says Renaud Bruyère (+33 3 84 66 26 55), a former chef from Tain-l’Hermitage who worked for Tissot before launching his own label in 2011. “Every young winemaker has an elder mentoring them.” Drawn by the Jura’s reputation as a rising, progressive region (16% of all vineyards are now farmed organically, twice the national average) and still-accessible land prices, numerous young winemakers are setting up estates, often with the help of established vintners.

Alexis Porteret, who launched the widely exported label Domaine des Bodines (+33 3 84 66 05 23) in 2010, says Pascal Clairet “taught me everything about viticulture”. Jean-Baptiste Ménigoz, already the toast of the Paris wine bar scene since launching his 4ha estate Les Bottes Rouges (+33 6 08 07 46 61) in 2012, credits his success to mentor Tissot, but also to the Jura’s new organic winemakers association.

The brainchild of Charles Dagand and Alice Bouvot of the innovative Domaine de l’Octavin (opusvinum.fr), since its creation in 2011 Le Nez dans le Vert (lenezdanslevert.com) has come to embody the Jura’s new wave. Its annual wine fairs – held both locally and in Paris – gather three dozen of the region’s best winemakers and are invariably packed with international buyers.

For the longtime ambassador for the Jurassian terroir, Jean-Paul Jeunet of the eponymous two-star restaurant in Arbois, it’s been a decade of “fantastic evolution” for his region’s wine – but the best may be yet to come. “Today, there really is a search for excellence, this desire to put the best in the bottle. They are interested in capturing the quintessence of their vines, and that wasn’t being done 30 years ago,” he says. “That gives us such hope for viticulture in the Jura, because given the wines these young winemakers are making today, imagine what it will be in a few years.”x

Above: a country road wends its way up to Baume-les-Messieurs; below left: chef Jean-Paul Jeunet; right: a server prepares for the evening at Jeunet’s restaurant in Arbois

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