The rain that everyone warns you about in the Jura arrived at 09:40, ten minutes after I had parked in Montigny-lès-Arsures. Stéphane Tissot looked at the sky, then at my shoes, and decided the vines could wait until after the cellar. Montigny sits 3 km north of Arbois on the Revermont, the western foot of the Jura mountains in eastern France, and the Jura takes about 1,100 mm of rain a year, which is one reason it makes the wines it does. Cold, wet, late. Nobody here is in a hurry.
Louis Pasteur kept his experimental vineyard in this same village, a short walk away: a useful fact to open a day about yeast.
A domaine from 1962, mapped one parcel at a time#
André and Mireille Tissot founded the domaine in 1962. Their son Stéphane and his wife Bénédicte have run it since 1990, and under them it has grown to about 50 hectares around Arbois and Montigny, with parcels at Château-Chalon too, between 250 and 400 metres on marl, limestone and gravel. All five Jura varieties are planted: Chardonnay, Savagnin, Poulsard, Trousseau and Pinot Noir. There are more than 30 cuvées.
The idea holding the thirty together is easy to state. Stéphane wants Arbois mapped the way Burgundy mapped the Côte d’Or: one parcel, one wine, so the soil is allowed to finish its own sentence. Beaune is only 100 km west, and the Jura has always watched it out of the corner of its eye.
I came to the domaine through a bottle of Arbois Chardonnay Les Bruyères that a friend opened in Brno a good ten years ago. I had it down as Meursault until the label came round. That mistake is how many people arrive at Jura Chardonnay, and I no longer mind having made it.
Biodynamics as farming, not belief#
The vineyards have been farmed biodynamically since 2004, with the Demeter mark on the labels since then. Stéphane’s public line on it has always been plain: biodynamics is farming, a way of keeping soil alive and vines resilient on slopes that see this much rain, not a creed. I have written about biodynamics without the mysticism elsewhere; Montigny is where I go to check that I still agree with myself.
In the cellar, the rule is parcel by parcel. Each Chardonnay lieu-dit is picked, pressed and fermented on its own, with the yeasts that came in on the grapes, then raised in barrel. Les Bruyères, La Mailloche, Les Graviers, En Barberon: names of slopes and soils, gravel and grey marl and red marl, each with its own row of barrels and its own chalk marks. Clos de la Tour de Curon, a walled parcel on the hill below its tower, is the top of the white pyramid. Added sulfur is low across the range and absent from a few cuvées.
Two schools of white and one veil#
The Jura splits its whites in two. Ouillé means the barrels are topped up as the wine evaporates, so no air gets in and the wine stays fresh; that is how the single-parcel Chardonnays are made. Sous voile means the barrel is left alone. The level drops, a veil of yeast forms on the surface, and over the years the wine turns from gold to amber and picks up walnut, curry and salt.
Vin jaune is the far end of the second school: Savagnin only, at least 60 months under the veil, no topping up, and it may not be sold until six years and three months after the harvest. It goes into the clavelin, a squat 62 cl bottle, the story being that this is what is left of a litre after six years in wood. Stéphane makes vin jaune by lieu-dit, En Spois, La Vasée and Les Bruyères, and a Château-Chalon from the limestone spur to the south. We drew a sample from a barrel under its veil since 2019, five years in and more than a year still to go.
“Vin jaune is the one wine where you are paid to do nothing,” he said, holding the glass up to the cellar bulb, “and to do it well for six years.”
Amphora beside the veil#
The experiments live in the next room. Clay amphorae hold Trousseau, Poulsard and a Savagnin bottled as Amphore, the point being to hear what the grape says with neither oak nor veil in the way. Trousseau Singulier is fermented whole-bunch and comes out peppery and dark-fruited. Poulsard DD is pale enough to read a newspaper through and has no sulfur added at all. All of it is made a few metres from a vin jaune whose method has not changed in a century, which is why the natural camp and the classic camp both count Tissot as theirs.
One glass: Les Bruyères 2022#
We tasted at the long table in the cellar at 13 °C. The Crémant du Jura Indigène opened: about 55 per cent Chardonnay and 35 per cent Pinot Noir, and the second fermentation is set off with a little of the estate’s own vin de paille rather than added sugar and cultured yeast. Bready, dry, a bitter-almond finish. Then the Chardonnays, in order of soil.
Lunch: morels, Comté and yellow wine#
Bénédicte joined us for lunch at a table near the square in Arbois. Poulet au vin jaune et aux morilles, the dish the region built around its wine: chicken, cream, dried morels, and a glass of vin jaune tipped into the pan at the end. With it, an ouillé Savagnin first, then the vin jaune En Spois that was on release, walnut and curry leaf, a saline finish the cream rounds off. Then a Mont d’Or baked in its box with a coil of Morteau sausage, and the Trousseau Singulier, whose pepper met the smoke of the sausage halfway. A slab of 30-month Comté closed it, with the last of the vin jaune.
We talked about Comté and how the fruitières grade it, about the Percée du Vin Jaune on the first weekend of February, and about how many barrels of Savagnin one person can reasonably keep track of.
Tissot on tour#
On my Jura and Beaujolais natural wine tour, Montigny-lès-Arsures anchors the Arbois days. We sleep in Arbois, 2 h 15 from Lyon airport; the morning is the cellar and the veil barrels, the afternoon a walk up the marl slopes if the weather allows. Cellar visits are by appointment, which I arrange; the domaine’s shop in Arbois is open to the public for a second look after lunch. Guests on the Burgundy and Champagne classics tour tend to ask me, over a Meursault, what Chardonnay tastes like 100 km east on marl. Les Bruyères is my answer, and I usually have a bottle in the van.
Bring a jumper for the cellar and proper shoes for the slopes. It is the Jura; the rain is part of the wine.
It stopped at 15:00, and we walked up to the vines after all, the marl slick and grey underfoot and the Chardonnay leaves already yellow. Six years and three months, Stéphane said, is not long if you have already decided to wait.
