• 100% Chardonnay
• Biodynamic
    
• View winemaker fact sheet

Domaine de la Touraize produces a single-vineyard Chardonnay from the limestone-rich soils of En Flandre, aged for two winters in used 600-liter barrels which are kept topped-up, and bottled without fining or filtration, and with a mere 20 milligrams per liter of sulfur. This is a wine of palate-staining, seashell-like minerality, with unapologetically intense acidity and a salty-sweet interplay on the palate that leaves one salivating in amazement.

From the importer:

Andre-Jean ("A-J") Morin is the eighth generation of Morin to tend the vine in Arbois, beginning with his ancestor Etienne in 1704, but the family enterprise nearly didn't survive the calamitous 20th century. A-J's grandfather Marius, deeply scarred by his years of service in the First World War, stopped producing wine in 1922 and sold off all his vineyards except for one tiny parcel: La Touraize. From this single plot, and against the advice of Marius, A-J's father Michel began rebuilding the estate in the mid-1950s, and A-J joined him in 1985, during which time they sold their fruit to the local co-operative. In 2009, A-J left the co-operative, selling three of his 15 hectares to finance the construction of his winery, and today he and his wife Heleana bottle the entirety of their production under the Domaine de la Touraize label.

Bright-eyed and quick-spoken, Andre-Jean exudes infectious enthusiasm for his craft; his is clearly a mind that could never be satisfied plying his trade under the anonymity of the co-operative. His modest cellar, just off the main road between Montigny-les-Arsures and Arbois, houses a visually comforting mix of decades-old foudres, well-worn tonneaux, a few stray clay jars, and an attic filled with barriques of Savagnin slowly transforming under veil. A-J obtained organic certification in 2016 and biodynamic certification in 2019, and his approach in the vineyards is rigorously labor-intensive: not only is harvest conducted by hand, but nearly all vineyard work is performed manually.
A-J even de-stems his reds by hand, using an old local tool known as a crible (famously employed by Pierre Overnoy in Pupillin): a wooden plank with grape-sized holes over which the harvested bunches are rolled back and forth until the fruit falls through.

Andre-Jean's approach in the cellar is adamantly non-interventionist: he never adds yeasts, never chaptalizes, never adds sulfur before malolactic fermentation is finished, never pumps the wines, never fines, never filters, and keeps sulfur additions between 10 and 20 milligrams per liter. Despite a relative absence of controls, however, A-J's wines are unfailingly clean, precise, and expressive-a reflection of his exacting, fastidious working regimen. Contrary to the majority of our imports from the region, most of Touraize's white wines are topped-up in barrel, offering a bare-knuckled minerality uncomplicated by oxidative notes yet still humming with telltale Jura salinity and power.