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“A wine made with love and passion produces an emotion…You can find in a wine the personality and the character of those who made it because each gesture, each operation, each decision has its importance.”

Tasted blind.

Pale straw.

Quite intense aromas of waxy lemon preserve, plasticine, dry white flowers, celery leaf, salty brine, sweet nuts and bruised apple. Crushed seashell, wood glue and a bit of laquer come through as well. Complex and nuanced, but not for everybody.

Palate is less obtuse and has nice waxy texture, bright acidity, balanced alcohol and decent persistence that is savory and distinct. Flavors follow the nose with nutty and brine notes, crushed rock, more bruised apple, wood glue and plasticine. Salty, tangy and waxy, quite invigorating and challenging to taste, I nailed this wine blind. The oxidative and aldehydic nature of the vinification is the signature stamped on this wine and once you tasted it, you’ll never forget it.

Somewhat similar to a light Fino, this is a delicate and wonderful food wine and really shines with funky, soft cheese like comté, mushroom cream sauces, quiche or heavily spiced Asian cuisine.

70% Chardonnay and 30% Savagnin from vines planted between 1976 and 2000.

The grapes for this wine are harvested, sorted and pressed with 1-3 grams of sulfur per hectoliter before being fermented separately in old foudre for 9 months and topped regularly. Then the lots are blended together and aged for a further 15 months without topping and lightly filtered before bottling (though I’ve read that these wines are not filtered, and I have yet to find out if the wine goes through malolactic…).

Domaine Tissot, located in Montigny-Les-Arsures, holds 35 hectares of Demeter certified vineyards in Arbois, Côtes du Jura and Château-Chalon. Yields are kept rigorously low, grapes are harvested by hand in small baskets, indigenous yeasts are utilized for fermentation and sulfur addition is minimal. Tissot is one of my go to producers in the Jura because of the quality, availability and pricing. Their philosophy is beautiful, simple and clear and I think it shows in their wines:

“A wine made with love and passion produces an emotion…You can find in a wine the personality and the character of those who made it because each gesture, each operation, each decision has its importance.

The “life force” is so well constructed that if we speak of natural wines, you will not find two wines that are the same anywhere in the world, as opposed to industrial wines which are all similar.

The industrialization of wine is the end of its identities, its nuances, its characteristics which are part of the magic of a bottle.

The work we do at our domaine, it is, in a way, the summary of all that.”

 

It is interesting to think about sense of place in the context of Jura. Does the oxidative nature of Jura wine (not all of the Tissot wine is oxidative) minimize or enhance a sense of place?

 

Regardless, this is REAL wine.