Domaine Roulot

The Free Bacchus Story

Guy Roulot died in 1982 with no successor in the cellar. His son was in Paris, training for the screen. So the family did something a traditional Meursault domaine had never done and hired a twenty-four-year-old American, Ted Lemon, on Jacques Seysses's recommendation — the first American to run a Burgundy estate.

Jean-Marc Roulot came back in 1989 and has held the domaine since. He never stopped acting; he appears in Ce Qui Nous Lie, the Burgundy film released in English as Back to Burgundy. What his father left him was less a set of vineyards than an argument: Guy had bottled Meursault's village lieux-dits separately at a time when the fashion was to blend the village and sell it under one name.

Sixteen hectares carry that argument now. The cellar stirs the lees less than Meursault convention does, on the reading that stirring builds richness and spends purity to get it. The wines come out leaner than the appellation's own fashion, which is a commercial risk taken deliberately.

The farming went organic in 2000. The certificate arrived only with the 2013 vintage, held with Ecocert. That is thirteen years of doing the work with nothing on the label to show for it.

Free Bacchus can only score the last thirteen years of that. The domaine farmed the same way throughout and the standard credits none of it before the certificate, which is the cost of a rule that does not take anyone's word for anything.