Domaine Dujac

The Free Bacchus Story

Jacques Seysses left the family biscuit business at twenty-five. In 1968 he bought Domaine Graillet at Morey-Saint-Denis, renamed it Dujac — a contraction of *du Jacques* — and released his first wine in 1969.

The house signature is whole-bunch fermentation, with little or no destemming depending on the vintage: the stems go into the vat rather than being stripped out. That is where the perfume and the structure in these wines come from, and it only works when the fruit is clean enough for the stems themselves to have ripened. Farming and winemaking are a single decision here rather than two.

A fraction of the domaine went organic in 2001, the whole estate followed by 2008, and the domaine dates its certificate to 2011. Jeremy Seysses has been open that the paperwork was never the point — he has said he does not want people buying the wine because it is organic.

He has also said that stopping herbicides alone took the domaine ninety per cent of the way, which is an unusually plain account of where the difficulty actually sits.

Biodynamic methods have been used since 2003 without ever being certified. We grade what is certified rather than what is described, so this sits on the organic mark alone — which, on this domaine’s own stated view of certificates, is probably the outcome it would predict.