Domaine André et Mireille Tissot

Montigny-lès-Arsures is a small village just outside Arbois. The domaine's first vine went in in 1956: 38 ares that Maurice Tissot planted for his son André. André and Mireille Tissot set up on their own in 1962, and by 1968 the farm had given everything else up for the vine. In 1983 the estate took the name it still carries, Domaine André et Mireille Tissot. Today the wines go out under the names of their son and his wife, Bénédicte & Stéphane Tissot, while the estate keeps its founders' name.

Stéphane finished his studies in Beaune in 1989 and began making wine at home the same year. Travels to Australia, South Africa and Chile followed, and in 1991 he started what the domaine calls its original vinifications at Montigny. Bénédicte arrived in 1993. From then on the estate changed fast: a first terroir Chardonnay, Les Graviers, and a first Spirale in 1997, vines at La Mailloche in 2000, and a whole new vineyard, the Clos de la Tour de Curon, cleared and planted from fallow land in 2002.

The farming moved with them. The vines went organic under Ecocert control in 1999, a horse began ploughing in 2002, the domaine made its first compost in 2003, biodynamics started in 2004, and Demeter approval followed in 2005. The domaine's website, written in the mid-2000s, counts 35 hectares farmed this way. Les Passionnés du Vin now gives fifty.

The aim, in their words, is to let the soils live, to ferment with natural yeasts and to use less sulphur in the cellar. That search has led to about 28 cuvées, often made terroir by terroir from sites like Les Bruyères, La Mailloche, En Barberon and Curon. A domaine that began with a single vine of 38 ares now bottles the Jura parcel by parcel.