Producer Burgundy, France
Domaine Jean Fournier
Domaine Jean Fournier is at 29 rue du Château in Marsannay-la-Côte, at the northern end of the Côte de Nuits where the vineyards run almost into the suburbs of Dijon. Marsannay is known locally as the Porte d'Or, the golden gate to the Côte, and it is the first serious village you come to heading south.
The Fournier family have been in Marsannay since the seventeenth century; there are documents from the reign of Louis XIII recording a Fournier here. Henri Fournier worked a small holding, mostly in Longeroies, and sold his wine in bulk to the merchants. He died on the eve of the 1960 harvest, and his seventeen-year-old son Jean, together with his mother and sister, had to keep the place going. Jean set up formally as a vigneron in 1962 and began selling to restaurants, first in barrel and then in bottle.
Jean's real contribution was where he planted. In 1964 he became the first Marsannay grower to take on vines in the Chenôve climats of Clos du Roy and Le Chapitre, both of which had carried a reputation since the early nineteenth century but had been let go. He also founded one of the oldest lutte raisonnée groups in the region, moving away from chemical farming decades before it was fashionable, and he has carried on pruning and ploughing in the vines well into his eighties.
His son Laurent joined in 2001 and now runs 22.5 hectares across the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune: Marsannay, Fixin, Gevrey-Chambertin and Gevrey premier cru, Clos de Vougeot, Aloxe-Corton, Corton and Pernand-Vergelesses, twenty-five wines in all. He converted the whole estate to organic farming after an approved spray went badly wrong in 2003, and certification came through in 2008.
What sets the domaine apart is the detail. The vines have been pruned Guyot-Poussard since 2017, a method that respects the flow of sap through the vine, and horses rather than tractors work the old vines. Massal selections of Pinot Noir are kept going to protect the variety's genetic diversity, and there is work on Pinot Beurot and Aligoté and grafts of Chardonnay Rose, a variety more or less endemic to Marsannay-la-Côte. Several parcels have been replanted at 13,000 to 20,000 vines per hectare against a normal 10,000, on the pre-phylloxera logic that competition drives roots deeper towards the rock. In the cellar the grapes are picked by hand into fifteen-kilo crates and rigorously sorted. Some whole bunches go in depending on the cuvée, there is a cold soak and a natural fermentation on wild yeasts, and the wine then spends sixteen to twenty months in barrel with very little done to it before the team bottles it at the domaine.
The two climats Jean gambled on in 1964, Clos du Roy and Le Chapitre, are the heart of the story. Marsannay has spent years working to have its best climats classified as premiers crus, and these two are exactly the kind of site that process is about. They are premier cru vineyards in everything but the paperwork, and that is why they deserve your attention.
Winery at Marsannay-la-Côte, Burgundy · Pinot Noir · £53.95 to £59.95 a bottle
