Domaine Tissot

The Free Bacchus Story

The Jura is fashionable now. It was not in the mid-1990s, when Stéphane Tissot began farming his family's Arbois vineyards organically, at a time when organic viticulture was only just getting started. Biodynamics came later.

Taste was moving the other way. The fashion then was for techniques such as micro-oxygenation that made wines bigger and more open when young; Tissot went towards reductive, low-sulphur winemaking instead. What he saw in the Jura was its soils: neighbouring vineyards on Lias and Trias marls, others on Jurassic limestone, each giving a different wine, with clean farming as the way to show the difference. The domaine entered Ecocert's organic certification in 1999 and has been a member of Biodyvin, the biodynamic growers' syndicate, since 2009.

He took on his parents' eighteen hectares and has doubled the estate to 35, all of it farmed biodynamically, then split it by site: the domaine makes 28 different wines, often one per plot, and says working that way asks a great deal of its whole team. In 2025 Wine Advocate's Luis Gutiérrez gave the 2017 Château-Chalon, a vin jaune, 98 points, and the 2022 En Barberon Chardonnay 92–95. The ouillé and non-ouillé bottlings, whether the barrels are kept topped up or left untopped to age under a veil of yeast, give the range a stylistic breadth that repays working through slowly.

Tissot was farming this way before there was much of a conversation to join, which is generally how these things go.