Domaine Labet

Domaine Labet sits in Rotalier, in the Sud-Revermont of the southern Jura, twenty kilometres or so from Château-Chalon. The family's wine roots here trace back to the 1950s, when Jean Labet tended two and a half hectares as part of a mixed polyculture farm. The domaine as a dedicated wine estate was founded in 1974 by Alain Labet, who converted the family barn into a winery; his wife Josie joined in 1976. Through the 1980s and early 1990s Alain quietly pioneered ouillé (topped-up) whites in Jura, breaking with the dominant oxidative tradition to make wines that expressed individual parcels rather than the yeast veil. In 1992 he made the first of his "Fleur" wines. They were difficult to sell locally at first. They helped shape the thinking of Ganevat, Marnes Blanches, Les Dolomies, and much of what became the modern Jura.

Alain and Josie's three children now run the estate, formally reunified in 2013. Julien (trained at Domaine Ramonet in Burgundy and Hamilton Russell in South Africa) leads the winemaking in a natural-but-precise register, pushing sulphur down even in hard vintages. Charline is the trained oenologist who works the cellar alongside him, with a particular hand on the sous-voile and Vin Jaune. Romain runs the vines.

Around thirteen to fourteen hectares spread across some forty to forty-five micro-parcels in four communes - Rotalier, Vercia, Grusse, Lons-le-Saunier. Soils are Bajocian and Bathonian limestone and marl, with Triassic and Lias elements, distinct from the Arbois side of Jura. Many vines are sixty years old or more, some close to a hundred. Whole domaine certified organic since 2013 (Julien's own parcels from 2010); biodynamic practice. Horse-drawn ploughing for the oldest parcels. Yields between 10 and 40 hl/ha, depending on plot and year. Around sixty thousand bottles a year, small enough to vanish quickly.

The domaine's defining gesture is precision: about thirty distinct cuvées per vintage, most of them single-parcel Chardonnays - Les Varrons (old vines on rich limestone), En Chalasse, La Bardette, Lias, Fleur, La Reine, En Billat, Le Monceau. Savagnin in both ouillé (including Fleur de Savagnin) and sous voile (Vin de Voile, Vin Jaune). Reds from Pinot Noir (Lias), Trousseau, Poulsard, Gamay, plus a blended Vin de France called Métis (Pinot Noir, Gamay, Trousseau, Poulsard). Crémant du Jura too.

The Labets' philosophy is une vigne, un vin - one vineyard, one wine - applied at a granularity most producers would find maddening. The result is a catalogue that reads like a very patient geology lesson. Alongside Ganevat, they are the reference name for Sud-Revermont terroir-specific work.