Franck Bonville

In 1936, with times hard for anyone selling grapes, Alfred Bonville and his son Franck bought a vignerons' house in the heart of Avize. Alfred had started buying vines early in the twentieth century, a few years after phylloxera, keeping to plots no more than a few hours away on horseback.

After the war the family's wine went to the négociant houses. Then Franck began bottling under his own name, and the first vintage was the exceptional 1959.

Gilles Bonville and his wife Ingrid modernised the cellar from the 1970s, replacing the old wooden foudres with enamelled tanks and, in the 1990s, stainless steel. Gilles's son Olivier joined in the late 1990s after studying viticulture and qualifying as an oenologist. In the 2000s he and his father extended the vineyard into Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. Since 2020 Olivier has worked alongside his son-in-law, Ferdinand Ruelle-Dudel, who is from Reims, trained as an aeronautical engineer and joined after a tour of the world's wine countries.

The house farms 15 hectares of Chardonnay in some 80 parcels across Avize, Oger and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, plus a little Cramant on the Avize boundary, all of it grand cru. Avize is the largest holding. It remains a grower-producer. It makes around 140,000 bottles a year with a team of fifteen.

Most of the wine ferments in stainless steel, and all of it goes through malolactic, which the family values for the richness it gives naturally fresh Chardonnay. Some reserve wines, and the base wines for the tirage and dosage liqueurs, are made in 228-litre barriques and 600-litre demi-muids. Les Belles Voyes, a single parcel high on the slope at Oger, is vinified in Burgundy barriques. Bottles spend two to eight years on their lattes. The range runs from the Brut Blanc de Blancs and the Unisson blend to the vintage wine and a village trilogy, Pur Avize, Pur Oger and Pur Mesnil, whose second fermentation takes place under cork.

Olivier and Ferdinand also run a separate label, Odyssée 319, with the stated aim of making a cuvée from each of Champagne's 319 villages.

Since 1936 the grapes have been pressed, and the wines made and aged, in the heart of Avize.