Jean-Francois Ganevat "Les Vignes de mon Pére" Côtes du Jura Savagnin 2008

Luis Gutiérrez scored this 2008 at 99–100 in June 2019, from a barrel it had already occupied for eleven years, before a single bottle existed.

Les Vignes de mon Père is the wine Jean-François Ganevat holds back longest. The US retailer naturalwine.com lists the 2008 as 100% Savagnin from Savagnin Vert vines planted in 1930 on the blue marl of the Chalasses site at Rotalier, raised eight to eleven years in cask, topped up throughout, with three releases over that span. Raffine, the domaine's importer in Japan, records the cuvée as Savagnin aged in used barrels, ouillé yet carrying a slight oxidative note, very large in frame and deep, and names it as the wine with which the domaine first tried bottling with no added sulphur dioxide. Wineholic repeats that claim for the 2008 itself: biodynamic fruit, wild-yeast fermentation, full malolactic, old wood.

Gutiérrez's Wine Advocate report from June 2019 describes the ritual. In one of the domaine's several cellars Ganevat decants a wine ahead of time, pours it without a word and waits. The 2008 was still on its lees in 600-litre barrels at that point and he expected bottling soon, which puts the élevage at roughly eleven years; iDealwine gives ten and a half years in demi-muids, and the importer's text quoted by Maruyamaya puts it at 130 months in small casks with topping up, against two years for the domaine's ordinary whites.

The Ganevat records at Rotalier go back to 1650, and until 1976 the family also kept cows for Comté. Jean-François, the fourteenth generation, started beside his father in 1980, spent nine years as cellar master at Jean-Marc Morey in Chassagne-Montrachet, came home in 1998 to farm biodynamically and stopped adding sulphur altogether from 2006. Raffine gives 13 hectares, 40% white grapes, around 35,000 bottles a year, with every white put through malolactic and no sulphur during vinification.

In the glass

Nicolas Greinacher (Vinous, July 2024, 98 points, as quoted by FINE+RARE) found candied peach, tangerine peel, baked apple, savoury chicken broth and honey, with waxy and hay notes underneath; the palate is rich and concentrated but cut by sharp Savagnin acidity, and the finish is nutty, saline and very long. Gutiérrez, tasting from barrel in 2019 (as quoted by FINE+RARE), got salty chicken broth, yeast, pollen and saffron, a wine light on its feet yet pungent, with a salty finish he could not bring himself to spit.

When to open

Vinous gives 2024–2038; Gutiérrez gave 2020–2040. Ganevat decants it in advance, and the importer's text advises opening these cellar-aged whites ahead and serving them a little warmer than usual.

At the table

Our suggestion, not the domaine's: Bresse chicken with morels in cream, or a piece of aged Comté from the same hills.

Quick facts

Provenance

Sourced from the Japanese importer.

Sources: Raffine (Japanese importer); Wineholic; naturalwine.com; iDealwine; Maruyamaya; Wine Advocate (L. Gutiérrez) and Vinous (N. Greinacher) as quoted by FINE+RARE