Rotalier is a village of a few hundred people in the Sud-Revermont, the southern end of the Jura vineyard in eastern France, about 15 kilometres south of Lons-le-Saunier. The slopes here are steeper than at Arbois and the vines are fewer: small parcels of Chardonnay and Savagnin cut into marl and limestone between woods and pasture. The October I first drove there it had rained all night, which in the Jura is not news, and by 09:30 the cloud was lifting off the ridge in strips.
I had an appointment made months ahead through a friend in the trade, and I had been told to bring boots. Jean-François Ganevat, whom everyone in the region calls Fanfan, met me by the tractor shed with a dog that had plainly been in the vines already. We would walk first, he said. The cellar would wait; the light would not.
Fourteen generations on one slope#
The Ganevats have farmed in Rotalier since 1650, fourteen generations by the family’s count. Fanfan left as a young man for Burgundy and spent about ten years at Domaine Jean-Marc Morey in Chassagne-Montrachet, a reference village for Chardonnay. He came home in 1998. His sister Anne joined him, and the négoce line from bought grapes that followed in the 2010s carries both their names on the label.
The estate vines run to about 13 hectares, which is not much. What is much is the number of labels: more than 40 including the négoce wines, many from a single parcel or a single row of an old variety, made in quantities that would not fill one Burgundy vat. It is a cellar of small decisions.
I met the wines before the man, as usual. A Chardonnay from Rotalier turned up at a tasting in Brno years ago, poured blind beside two Meursaults, and it was the one the room argued about: clearly Burgundian in its cut, clearly from somewhere else in its salt. When the bottle was turned round I wrote down the village and started asking for the door.
Marl, old vines and grapes nobody plants#
The walk took us up a slope so steep the rows run across it in short steps. The soil is grey and blue marl with limestone rubble, sticky after rain and hard as tile in August. Farming is biodynamic and yields are kept very low, low enough that Fanfan talked about them in bunches per vine rather than hectolitres per hectare. He picked up a stone, turned it over to show the fossil shell on the back, and put it in my pocket without a word.
Then the part I had come for. Beside the Chardonnay and Savagnin, the Pinot Noir, Poulsard and Trousseau, the estate has spent years rescuing grape varieties the Jura had all but stopped planting: Enfariné, Gueuche, Argant, Petit Béclan and Gros Béclan, Portugais Bleu, Corbeau. They grow mixed in the same rows, field blends in the old manner, picked and fermented together. Because the appellation rules make no room for them, most of these wines are bottled as Vin de France; the front label says less, and the wine says more.
“Every one of these grapes was here before I was,” Fanfan said, holding up a bunch of Enfariné dusted with the white bloom that gives it its name. “I did not invent anything. I found them and gave them somewhere to grow.”
In the cellar the rule is patience. Chardonnay goes into old barrels, topped up in the ouillé way, and stays there two to four years, far longer than most of Burgundy would dare. Savagnin for Les Vignes de Mon Père is left under the veil and sold after about a decade. The reds ferment whole-bunch on their own yeasts. Sulfur is added in very small amounts or not at all, a decision taken barrel by barrel; what that decision costs and buys is in my note on sulfites in wine.
One glass: Les Chalasses Vieilles Vignes 2018#
We tasted in the barrel cellar from a bottle Fanfan pulled off a pallet, at cellar temperature, with the dog asleep against a cask.
A red followed, one of the old-variety field blends: pale, peppery, smoky and light on its feet, with tannins that arrived like a suggestion. He poured it at cellar temperature too. In the Jura that is not a fashion. It is the climate.
Lunch in Lons-le-Saunier#
There is no table at the estate, so at noon I drove the 15 kilometres back to Lons-le-Saunier and did what I do with a group: found a plain restaurant with a slate menu and ordered by region. A plate of Morteau sausage, smoked over softwood, with warm potatoes; then poulet au vin jaune et aux morilles, chicken in a cream sauce built on the local wine, the dish that explains sous voile Savagnin to people who thought they did not like it.
I had a Ganevat Chardonnay in my bag and the owner waved away the corkage. With the Morteau it was good; with a slab of 24-month Comté from the fruitière at the end, it was the pairing of the day, the hazelnut in the cheese meeting the hazelnut in the wine and the salt finishing both.
Ganevat on tour#
I will be plain about the door. Domaine Ganevat is not open to the public and the wines are sold by allocation. I was let in once, alone; I do not promise it to a group. The estate also changed hands in 2021. That is public record, it is not my story, and I leave it there. Mine is the slope and the cellar.
What I can promise is the wine on the table. On my Jura and Beaujolais natural wine tour we sleep in Arbois, and Rotalier is 40 kilometres and 45 minutes south. One evening I pour a Ganevat Chardonnay beside an ouillé white from Tissot at Montigny, and the group learns the difference between the north and the south of one small region in two glasses. We ask for the door in Rotalier each time; if it opens that week, good, and if not, the bottle comes to the table. The cellars we do walk into, the shop at La Pinte and the voile barrels above Pupillin, are chosen so that the Rotalier bottle makes sense when it arrives.
On the Burgundy and Champagne classics tour the bottle plays a different part. On the last night in Beaune, after a week of Chassagne and Puligny, I open the Chalasses blind. Someone always calls it a premier cru from the Côte de Beaune; someone else always says it is too salty for that. Both are right, which is the point: a man trained in Chassagne took the discipline home to a marl slope on the far side of the Bresse plain and made something Burgundy cannot.
I drove out of Rotalier with the fossil still in my pocket. It sits on my desk in Brno now, next to a cork with 1902 written on it in pencil, and between them they explain the estate better than I have here.
