Domaine Tissot

The Free Bacchus Story

The Jura is fashionable now. It was not in the 1990s, when Stéphane and Bénédicte Tissot began converting their Arbois estate to biodynamics — the region's oxidative Savagnin, its unusual Poulsard and Trousseau reds and its Vin Jaune were admired by a small circle and ignored by everyone else.

Converting was therefore a bet on distinctiveness at precisely the moment international taste was moving toward the opposite. What the Tissots recognised was that the Jura's blue and grey limestone marls, soils that appear nowhere else in France's significant regions, combined with extreme day-to-night temperature swings to produce a character that biodynamic farming would intensify rather than smooth away. Certification under both Demeter and Ecocert completed in 2004.

He took on his parents' eighteen hectares and roughly doubled the estate, then split it by site: blue and grey marls, limestone and clay all behave differently in the Jura, and bottling them separately multiplies every job in the cellar. The estate now farms more than 50 hectares under full biodynamic management. The En Barberon Chardonnay and the Vin Jaune from Château Chalon have drawn 95 points from Wine Advocate. The ouillé and non-ouillé bottlings, whether the barrels are kept topped up or allowed to oxidise, give the range a stylistic breadth that repays working through slowly.

The Jura is now among the most discussed wine regions in the world. Tissot was farming it carefully before there was any conversation to join, which is generally how these things go.