Before Jura became a hit with every cool kid sommelier out there, it really was - and it honestly still entirely is - an agricultural space tucked, and you'd almost think forgotten, between the borders of French Burgundy and Switzerland, nestled and shaped by the contours of the Jura mountains. The people there exist and live much as it was generations prior, with the cuisine still very much reflecting the terrain and traditions that have evolved from it. A meal in the cozy home of a local would largely consist of soft farmer cheeses, handmade sausages, fish quenelles, roasted chicken and a leg of lamb topped with morel cream sauces, and of course Jura's incredibly distinct and unique oxidative wines - all very much coming from the local land itself, with the region pretty much self-sustaining. 

A small region with an incredibly distinctive traditional cuisine reflecting the purity of the land.

And of course, we're here to talk about the wines, which even in the wide and wild world of wines, are considered quite the delicacy, long designed to be paired with the local cuisine. The oxidative, saline and spiced, long aged Vin Jaune is probably the most famous, but there are others, from Vin de Paille to Macvin du Jura and also Cremant du Jura - all of which have been made for generations in the region, entirely for local enjoyment, and definitely long before a sommelier with patchwork tattoos gives you a sly smile as he or she whips out one of them. The wines here, much like the local cuisine, has been largely shaped by the fact that the Jura area whilst, full of life and sustenance, is often much colder and wetter in climate, and thus harvesting anything doesn't get to happen all too regularly, and thus the goal of extending shelf-life plays a huge hand in what's produced and enjoyed here. Fermentation, the use of spices, fortifying and ageing, are all techniques used commonly and broadly across every produce in Jura.

Yet, as the times have changed, and even though the traditional methods of Jura have once again become fashionable, it almost seems like after generations of the same ethos, it was about time that somebody came along and asked "What if?".

Stéphane and his wife, Bénédicte.

That man is Stéphane Tissot.

“Wine is for pleasure: for sharing. We share bottles with people to understand and discover something new. But wine isn’t necessary for living, like food is - it’s a different agriculture in that regard - so it seems even more stupid to use chemicals in viticulture. If wine is for pleasure and for education, then it doesn’t make sense to drink chemicals. I hope one day that all wine will be farmed organically...It’s a much cleaner form of viticulture. It is sad when you see great terroirs that are wasted by unclean viticulture. Organic or biodynamic farming is important to show identity and typicity.”

The Tissot vineyard.

Stéphane grew up in a winemaking family. Like many others in Jura, his grandfather had a fairly small plot of land upon which he maintained a farm that would produce what was typical of the local area. It featured 2.5 hectares of vines and homed cows for milk and making Comte cheese. The small parcel was later divided amongst his children, and Stéphane's parents (André and Mireille, for whom the winery remains named after - Domaine André et Mireille, officially established in 1962) would inherit all of less than one hectare of land. And whilst Stéphane's parents had avoided the use of herbicides, the 70's and 80's was nevertheless the era of sweeping industrialisation, which Stéphane terms "unclean viticulture", and thus their parcel was not completely devoid of industrial practices. They would grow the parcel to some 18 hectares, and in 1989, a young Stéphane would join his parents to produce his first vintage in 1990.

He had in his early years picked up valuable experience in Australia and South Africa, and yet it was his time in Burgundy that most shaped his ethos. It was in Burgundy that he understood the importance of a wine's ability to showcase its terroir and display a sense of place, and he had seen what was possible with the Chardonnay's of Burgundy. This prompted Stéphane to question a long held belief in the Jura region - that if it should remain as such that the focus of making wines should rest heavily on the work done in the cellar. That is, should viniculture reign over viticulture? 

As it turns out, the generations-old tradition in Jura was to focus on the winemaking itself and what could be made of the harvested fruit, which has resulted in everything from long-aged oxidative wines to liqueurs, and all the way from still to sparkling wines. Yet Stéphane questioned why it was that there wasn't more emphasis put on the viticulture aspect of the equation, with the goal being to ensure that the best possible fruit was produced from the vines, long before it entered the cellars. Stéphane reasoned that the quality of the fruit produced would serve as the ceiling to which a wine's quality could maximally achieve. “The industrialization of wine is the end of its identities, its nuances, its characteristics which are part of the magic of a bottle.” says Stéphane.

The first order of business for Stéphane was to begin improving the health of the vines. He would spend years to first achieve organic status by 1999, and five more years to be certified biodynamic. "When you’re biodynamic, you have a different life in your vines, in your grapes, and in this way, you can make very easy wine. It leads you. You can keep your yields low, and it increases the minerality. When you drink a glass, you want to drink another one, because they have very nice acidity." explains Stéphane. Thanks to the early work of Nicolas Joly (of Coulee de Serrant) and Nady Foucault (of Clos Rougeard) whose biodynamically produced wines had a profound impact on a young Stéphane, he now believes that the adherence to these practices has allowed for his wines to properly showcase Jura's unique terroir. The influence of Jura's unique diversity of terroir is a quality he heavily focuses on demonstrating with his various expressions of the same wine style, each produced from different plots, a rare initiative in the region that has made Stéphane the poster child for terroir-driven wines.

From there, he's continued to build upon the ultimate quest for making terroir-driven wines, further exploring the unique landscape of Jura. Considering the region's 200 million year old soils, Stéphane talks of how his Chardonnays produced on opposite sides of a dirt track can emerge so differently, with one side characterised as lias marne (limestone rich), and the other as trias marne (clay rich), significantly differing in terms of how much limestone and clay deposits have accumulated in the soils from millions of years of geological evolution. “If you take Chardonnay, for example, if it’s planted on limestone here, you get something more mineral: fine, delicate and salty. Lias clay will give you more bitter characteristics: citrus, but also something spicy. Trias clay gives a much larger wine, something more rustic, with very smoky aromas. These soils are millions of years apart, and the sediment is totally different, so the wine will be totally different.” 

“I’m in the north of the area. I make seven different Chardonnay. Every one is from a different soil — clay, marl, limestone — and each produces a different style of the wine. Most Jura producers make one Vin Jaune. I have enough Savagnin that I make four Vin Jaunes, each from different soils. When you speak about Vin Jaune, you speak about the winemaking, of the style, of the power, of the concentration, but sometimes we miss all the complexity of the wine on every soil. For me, four different Vin Jaunes is a step forward for winemaking.”

Unsurprisingly even the genetic diversity of the vines are of great concern to Stéphane, who emphasises the use of massal selection as opposed to the more popular clonal selection of Burgundy. By reproducing his vineyards from a selection of vines as opposed to just one specifically preferred vine, Stéphane may forfeit some sense of optimisation and scale, and yet what he gains in turn is complexity and a true characterful snapshot of the land as it is instead of what he might want it to be. And even with all this diversity, quality is ensured through yield control, smaller fruit, and a preservation of the acid. Across his 35 hectares of vines (which he expanded from his parents' 18 hectares), which spans vineyards in Les Bruyères, La Mailloche, En Barberon and Curon, Stéphane grows all five key varieties of Jura, from the more international Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, to the local specialties Savagnin, Poulsard and Trousseau.

And although ever as enthusiastic about the virtues of Jura's unique wines which he continues to help see evolve, over three decades at the helm of his family's winery has seen Stéphane's own evolution as a winemaking. “I think at the beginning, when you start to make wine, it’s very easy to make a wine more concentrated, more woody, or more powerful. That’s what I did, and it was interesting and exciting at the time. It’s just human nature - maybe it’s our way of proving we can make that kind of style. You can compare it to learning how to cook.” tells Stéphane.

As a young winemaker, Stéphane concedes that his winemaking was perhaps formulaic, with the usual emphasis on the role of the winemaking, as opposed to that of the grower. With time, and a greater conviction in the desire to focus on showcasing Jura's terroir, Stéphane's winemaking these days is marked by minimal intervention, with no batonnage, significantly cutting back on the use of sulphur, and the greater use of old oak, allowing the character of the wine to step forward in its truest form. He's also moved from the use of commercial yeast to that of indigenous yeast, which was the result of his internship in Australia where it occured to him that the same commercial yeast he was using back home in Jura was no different from what was used in Australia which would only serve to create uniform wines.

On the back of his application of organic farming to his vines, this has allowed him to more easily allow the naturally occurring yeasts to do their work, whilst also giving him high quality lees which helps to support more complexity in the wines without adding augmentation. “You need to protect the grapes and to not put products on them, to make sure your yeast population is big enough. Many chemical products in a sense sterilise the grapes, which means your fermentation will be complicated as there aren’t enough yeasts on the grapes. If you put chemicals on your grapes, then you’ll have chemicals in the lees, which means you can't use them. If you work organically, then it’s not a problem to keep lots of your lees." instructs Stéphane.

Yet with all conviction in moving Jura's wines forward, Stéphane has no desire to be different for the sake of it. His goal is simply to produce traditional Jura wine styles as best as he can. "In the Jura, all our different styles of winemaking are part of tradition, not because of fashion. Here, crémant has always been very popular, and it represents one third of the region’s wine production. We have Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and the climate and soil means we have nice acidity and a great potential for crémant."

That doesn't mean he won't make them better if he can. "I really wanted to minimise any additions from “outside,” so I thought for many years about a way to create crémant using only juice and yeasts from our estate. I figured out a way to do this, by using grape juice and fermenting vin de paille - so no sugar additions, and only yeasts that come from our vineyards."

“The expression of terroir is complicated, and it depends whether you’re speaking about white wine or red wine. Logically, in our simple minds you might say that it’s easier to have an expression of terroir through white wine, as the winemaking is usually the same: you press the grapes and you ferment and the soil expression comes faster. For the reds, it’s more complicated… Some people say it’s better to use the stems or to not use the stems. It’s your experience, your opinion, your wine. For me, the expression of the soil is higher if you use whole bunches, and try to preserve the maximum of the grapes before fermentation. I make two Pinot Noirs. One is from limestone and one is from clay. I don’t think the expression of the soil was as obvious before I started to use whole bunches.”

For a small region with big character, and more global appreciation than ever before for its unique wines, even though Jura produces less than 1% of all wines made in France, it is people like Stéphane who continue to bring the region's wines a step into modernity, whilst preserving its traditions. The harsh winters and the difficulty to achieve optimal ripeness here simply won't stop its brood of passionate artisans from expressing themselves through their wines, producing everything from Vin Jaune to Cremant with as colourful a character as these winemakers themselves.

“You always find a way to evolve and you should always look to do better. You have a personal evolution, like a chef in a kitchen. You’ll make a different wine when you’re 50, or 60, to what you made when you were 25. If you own and farm your vines, the personality of your wine is very clear. The wine becomes an image of your personality. As soon as you involve consultant winemakers, you lose this. You make your own wine, with your own feelings, and your own love. It’s not easy to think of the best bottles you’ve had in your life, but it is easy to find the best moments. That is important: wine isn’t just for you, it’s for sharing in a time and a place, with special people.”

Stéphane Tissot

Wine Review: Benedicte & Stephane Tissot Macvin du Jura Blanc

And so today we'll be trying a Jura specialty, the Macvin du Jura, which is a sweet fortified wine that is made by combining unfermented grape juice (the must) with local grape brandy (called marc), and after which it is then matured in oak barrels. What's particularly unique here is that the fortification is done with grape brandy as opposed to wine. This is a particular specialty also of Stéphane, and is made with 100% Chardonnay (he also makes a Rouge that is made with 100% Pinot Noir), and is aged in the winery's warm cellars for about 10 years before being bottled.

Tasting Notes

Colour: Deep Orange / Gold

Aroma: Round, supple and rich, it opens fresh with heaps of orange blossoms, layered upon a base of honey and herbal cough syrup. Those orange scents continue to evolve into all manners of orange lozenge, orange marmalade and orange kombucha, at times lightly doughy, whilst also taking on a more herbal and medicinal form. It's incredibly floral and perfumed, leading on to banana blossoms, with also this deep muskiness of stewed longans and lychees. It strikes an overall deeper and darker tone, and with good depth and richness. 

Taste: Full-bodied, it's entirely syrupy and rich without being heavy, instead coming across candied with a hit of pepper. It continues to showcase big and fully saturated notes of orange blossoms and herbal orange candies. It peaks in intensity, after which it mellows out to more on maltose candy mixed in with brown sugar. It keeps on with that vibrant expressiveness, aromatic and fragrant, with that persistent liqueur like quality. Going down its depth, there's also marzipan, and continued tones of raisinated fruit of yellow raisins and quince paste. Along the way it at times shows a slick sharpness of the acidity which always then mellows out seamlessly and glides across in candied fashion. Whilst rounded and rich, the sweetness shows restraint. The body remains taut and almost bouncy.

Finish: More on that herbal cough syrup and orange blossoms that continues through the finish with persistence. It's still incredibly floral with a slight medicinal quality. It's a long and rich, aromatic finish, with lingering notes of banana blossoms and green mango, still entirely floral and herbal.

My Thoughts

Impressively complex and well-integrated, it was entirely cohesive and rounded, and despite its age, still felt vibrant, fresh and vivid. It's impeccably aromatic and yet the flavours and scents always felt distinct and precise even amidst the rounded and supple body. The sweetness showed good restraint and control, never going over the top, in fact at times you'd almost forgot it was there, especially on the palate, which opens like something of essential oils, herbal fruit liqueur and potpourri, with a touch of energetic and lively pepperiness. It's taut and never comes across cloying, almost bouncy actually. Into the finish, it's long, carrying all the same aromatic intensity with no loss of power, and ends with a clean, yet seamless and firm finish.

There's just so much subtle and understated mastery in this Macvin - what might seem simple and wholeheartedly enjoyable on the surface, hides beneath it an orchestra of perfectly executed measures to create something of such harmony, complexity and boldness.