Zeste de Savagnin

The skin-macerated Savagnin of Domaine de la Touraize - though per US importer Rosenthal, André-Jean Morin adamantly resists calling it orange wine. The 2022 gets a natural fermentation macerating a full month, is raised in amphora and barrel, and goes to bottle without fining or filtration, total sulphur under 20 mg/L. The producer's 2016 sheet for the cuvée puts its Savagnin on blue marls at 300 metres facing north-west.

Rosenthal's cuvée sheet describes the method as hand destemming over a traditional sieve, a semi-carbonic maceration with no pump-overs or punch-downs, then two winters on fine lees in a single 12-hectolitre clay jar - a narrower vessel story than the producer's own amphora-and-barrel account of the 2022. The importer also carries the method's origin: a barrel of 2018 Chardonnay drifting toward volatile acidity was rescued with skins from a just-fermented younger wine, and the technique stuck. The cuvée itself goes back at least to 2016, when it was a two-week maceration raised three years in barrel, so the current recipe is an evolution, not the founding idea.

Vinous's Jura report describes 2022 as a season of extremes that landed well: April frosts to -5 C, June hail, then a long stretch of July heat and drought that mid-August rain finally broke, with yields near 40 hl/ha restoring what 2021's frost had taken and the still-wine harvest starting in early September. It found the vintage's whites uneven - "the finest examples shine brightly" while others want for acidity - riper and more concentrated than the fresher 2023s.