"Some winemakers claim not to do much in the winery. “The wines make themselves,” they may say. Others seem like alchemists: expert blenders and manipulators who coax beautiful wines even from unlikely terroir.
"Some winemakers claim not to do much in the winery. “The wines make themselves,” they may say. Others seem like alchemists: expert blenders and manipulators who coax beautiful wines even from unlikely terroir.
These may seem like opposite poles. The magic of Jean-François Ganevat, though, is that he occupies them both.
His “naturalist” tendencies are obvious. He farms naturally and biodynamically, and he is obsessed with using as little sulfur as possible. His wines developed an early cult following among the natural wine crowd, and the cult has only become more fervent over time.
But he is also very much an “alchemist,"" as Kermit Lynch describes him on their website. He makes up to 40 different cuvées every vintage and treats all of them differently. He uses a variety of techniques like lees-aging and deliberate oxidation to protect the wines in their low-sulfur environment. Although every wine ultimately comes from nature, there is no question that Ganevat has followed his own very precise intuitions and recipes to bring them to greatness."
