Description
Domaine de Montbourgeau, “L’Étoile” Vin Jaune
Over the years at SommSelect, we’ve nearly checked every box in Jura’s playbook, from sous voile whites to sneakily delicious crémants to this morning’s gloriously polished and perfumed Pinot Noir. But today is the first time we’re offering the region’s most traditional, most extreme, most profound wine: vin jaune. Reserved for the most curious and adventurous aficionados, this 2015 “L’Étoile” is a legitimately head-spinning experience from one of the region’s greatest producers.
Deeply concentrated and powerfully bone-dry, it rumbles with oxidative fruits, crushed nuts, and cheese rind while booming with chalky minerality. Honestly, it feels like going back to the Middle Ages when wine was made in a farmer’s barn, not a fancy cellar. Still, that doesn’t disqualify it from being unabashedly delicious or an incredible pairing tool at the table. An experience as grand as Montbourgeau Vin Jaune isn’t just one to save for a special occasion, it is the special occasion. It’s a unique wine whose confluence of place, history, and technique is as tightly interwoven as Sauternes and botrytized sweet wine or Champagne and sparkling perfection. In summation, to drink vin jaune is to know the Jura, but to enjoy vin jaune is to fully appreciate it. Love premium oxidative wines? Want to explore the most curious and esoteric styles on earth? Then it’s time for you to check off one of your own boxes! Up to three bottles per person, and we only have enough for a couple dozen lucky customers.
Vin jaune is one of the most fascinating wine styles on earth, produced from late harvests of the Jura’s signal white variety, Savagnin. The wine ferments dry, then the winemaker more or less walks away. In other wine styles, a barrel is “topped up” to fill the headspace left by evaporating wine, but no such thing happens with vin jaune. Instead, it ages for no less than six years: Montbourgeau’s matures for one year in massive foudres before six more years in neutral 230-liter barrels, during which it undergoes a remarkable transformation. A layer of yeast grows on top of the wine—not unlike the flor found in Jerez—which protects it from excessive oxidation and allows it to slowly concentrate through evaporation. This is how it develops intoxicating new flavors and aromas. At the end of aging, only about 62% of the original wine remains, and it’s transformed into an utterly beguiling admixture of briny minerality, honeyed fruit, and rigorously powerful structure. Sherry is probably the closest analog but, unlike Sherry, vin jaune is an unfortified beast of its own. Another distinction is that peculiar squat bottle known as a clavelin. Unique to Jura, this 620ml format represents how much wine remains from one liter after enduring six years of evaporation (“the angel’s share”) in barrel.
rn
If this is your first vin jaune, you could ask for no better guide than Nicole Deriaux. Her Montbourgeau estate is one of the benchmark addresses in the Jura. Nicole’s grandfather, Victor Gros, established the estate in 1920, and her father Jean was responsible for expanding it to its current size. She’s been working the family vineyards since 1986, and her three sons are now poised to take over. Making great vin jaune, unmarred by flaws or clumsy aging, takes a deft hand, and Nicole has that in spades. Everything in the vineyards is done by hand, and wines are slowly fermented in the family’s very old barrels. The Jura, with its renegade aging practices, can be a bit of a minefield as far as consistency goes, but Nicole’s wines in L’Étoile—a smaller, prized sub-zone in Jura—have been go-to sources of unadorned Jura deliciousness for decades now.
rn
Now going on almost eight years of age, Montbourgeau’s 2015 Vin Jaune is a true marvel. It pours a golden-yellow and its aromas leap from the glass with the very first pour. The nose is almost overwhelming in its power, redolent of dried yellow and red apple, pear skin, honey, wet wool, lanolin, lees, dried quince, golden raisins, brine, Marcona almonds, beeswax, and pulverized chalk. The bone-dry palate is similarly impactful, but any concerns over it being overpowering can be quickly discarded; despite the density of aroma and flavor, this is still wildly elegant. Such a wine as this is something to be slowly savored over several evenings, and I love it simply sipped alongside some cheese and nuts. This is, in short, one heck of a wine, a vinous experience you’ll never forget.
