Domaine Arnaud Ente

The Free Bacchus Story

Arnaud Ente was working at Coche-Dury when he married Marie-Odile Thévenot in 1991. The vines he began with the following year were rented from his father-in-law, the vigneron Philippe Thévenot. Almost nothing about the start was his own.

What he built out of it is four hectares worked by four people: Ente, his wife and two employees. That is the entire domaine, and there is very little wine to go round.

The hierarchy runs on vine age rather than on classification. Younger fruit becomes the straight Meursault; vines planted in and around 1950 make Clos des Ambres, and even they are not the old-vine bottling. That is La Sève du Clos, from vines believed to have been planted immediately after phylloxera.

Ente’s wines of the 1990s drew attention for an opulent style. Since 2000 he has picked earlier to keep natural acidity and a greater sense of minerality, and Jasper Morris describes the result as pure, precise and chiselled. The farming is certified organic by Certipaq Bio under control code FR-BIO-09, and the Agence Bio register shows the domaine under organic control since April 2012.