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Les Bottes Rouges
Jura, France11 wines4.1 avg
83
Jean-Baptiste Ménigoz's Jura domaine in Abergement-le-Petit - a former special-needs teacher who apprenticed with Tissot and named his estate after a rock song.
Jean-Baptiste Ménigoz was a teacher in Arbois, working with special needs children, for about a decade before he became a winemaker. Somewhere in that decade he became fixated on low-intervention wine, and started spending his free time in the vineyards. He took a viticulture course in Beaune at the turn of the 2010s, apprenticed with Stéphane Tissot in Montigny-lès-Arsures - one of the Jura's biodynamic reference figures - and founded Les Bottes Rouges in 2012, renting vines first and buying them gradually.
The name comes not from his footwear but from a song by the French punk band Les Wampas. Musical references continue through the cuvée names - Tôt ou Tard (Sooner or Later) is the name of an independent French record label, and so on. Musical taste is one of the domaine's signatures.
Florien Kleine Snuverink, who had owned the famed Café Schiller in Amsterdam, moved to Jura in 2014 to learn winemaking. She had initially planned to buy her own vines; she interned for a couple of years and joined Les Bottes Rouges instead.
The domaine is based in Abergement-le-Petit, on the Arbois-Poligny axis (about eight kilometres from Arbois, seven from Poligny). Around seven hectares across seven plots, with further expansion under way. Soils vary from limestone to heavy clay and marl. The five classic Jura grapes - Chardonnay, Savagnin, Poulsard, Trousseau, Pinot Noir - with Savagnin dominant. Organic from day one, biodynamic experimentation per parcel, native yeasts, low or no sulphur, no fining or filtration.
Les Bottes Rouges sits in the cohort of younger Jura naturalists - alongside Tony Bornard (who took over from his father Philippe in 2017), Kenjiro Kagami, Les Dolomies, and Peggy Buronfosse - working the Overnoy-Houillon lineage in their own registers.
