Domaine de Chassorney

Frédéric Cossard inherited his love of wine from his grandfather, who grew grapes for the family table. He trained as an engineer in the milk industry and worked for years as a Burgundian wine broker before making the switch. Without family land or outside capital, buying vineyards was hard; after long negotiations with the bank he founded Domaine de Chassorney in Saint-Romain, on the western edge of the Côte de Beaune, in 1996. At its peak the estate covered around ten hectares across several Burgundian villages. In 2006 he added a négociant arm under his own name, working with organically and biodynamically farmed fruit bought around Burgundy.

Farming was organic from the start and, over time, broadly biodynamic. Drawing on his years with raw, unpasteurised milk, Cossard described his approach as "homoeopathic" - tailored remedies per parcel, rather than recipe winemaking. In the cellar: indigenous yeasts, no temperature control, no added sulphites, spontaneous fermentations running for months. Reds went a year or more in barrel with no racking or bâtonnage; everything was bottled unfined and unfiltered. Instead of chemical sanitisers, he said the barrels were cleaned with an ionised-oxygen process.

From the mid-2010s Cossard began ageing parallel cuvées in Georgian qvevri alongside oak, looking for slower, gentler oxygen exchange; some wines appeared in two variants, qvevri and regular.

From the 2022 vintage the Chassorney estate was sold outright to his long-time friend Aurélien Verdet - a Hautes-Côtes-de-Nuits vigneron in his own right - who now runs it from Arcenant after a handover period from around 2018 to 2021. Cossard continues his own work through the négoce side under Frédéric Cossard.