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. He is in his eighties now and still out in the vines pruning and ploughing.

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 a properly approved spray went badly wrong on him in 2003, and certification came through in 2008.

What sets the domaine apart is the detail. Guyot-Poussard pruning since 2017, which respects the flow of sap through the vine. Horses rather than tractors on the old vines. Massal selections of Pinot Noir kept going to protect the variety's genetic diversity, plus work on Pinot Beurot and Aligoté and grafts of Chardonnay Rose, a variety more or less endemic to Marsannay-la-Côte. Several parcels 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: hand-picking into fifteen-kilo crates, rigorous sorting, some whole bunch depending on the cuvée, a cold soak, natural fermentation on wild yeasts, then sixteen to twenty months in barrel with very little done to the wine, and bottling by the team at the domaine.

The two climats Jean gambled on in 1964 are Clos du Roy and Le Chapitre. Marsannay has no premiers crus. The application to classify its best climats has been running for years, and the appellation rules already let growers put the climat name on the label in anticipation of it. That is the whole reason these two wines are worth your attention: they are premier cru sites in everything but the paperwork, sold at village prices. Around sixty per cent of Marsannay is now farmed organically, which tells you what kind of village it has become.