Château-Chalon

Château-Chalon is the appellation that makes nothing else: vin jaune only, no other style permitted inside it, and for Bénédicte and Stéphane Tissot it is the one wine off that hill. Savagnin, grown on the grey and blue Liassic marls that give the commune its name, mixed with limestone scree off the plateau above.

The method is the whole thing. After fermentation on indigenous yeasts the wine goes into old barrels and is deliberately not topped up. A film of yeast forms across the surface and the wine sits beneath it for years, oxidising slowly under the voile rather than being protected from air. The appellation sets the floor at six years and three months in cask, with release no earlier than 1 January of the seventh year after the harvest - so a 2017 could not legally be sold before January 2024.

That long stay is also why the bottle is an odd size. The clavelin holds 620 ml, traditionally explained as what is left of a litre once the angels have taken their share over six years and three months. Savagnin picked ripe and fermented dry starts high in alcohol, and years of evaporation in cask push it higher still.