Domaine de la Touraize Arbois Blanc “Les Moulins” 2021

"André-Jean (“A-J”) Morin is the eighth generation of Morin to tend the vine in Arbois, beginning with his ancestor Etienne in 1704, but the family enterprise nearly didn’t survive the calamitous 20th century. A-J’s grandfather Marius, deeply scarred by his years of service in the First World War, stopped producing wine in 1922 and sold off all his vineyards except for one tiny parcel: La Touraize. From this single plot, and against the advice of Marius, A-J’s father Michel began rebuilding the estate in the mid-1950s, and A-J joined him in 1985, during which time they sold their fruit to the local co-operative. In 2009, A-J left the co-operative, selling three of his 15 hectares to finance the construction of his winery, and today he and his wife Héléana bottle the entirety of their production under the Domaine de la Touraize label.

Les Moulins is a southwest-facing vineyard of grey-blue marl situated at 350 meters altitude, and Touraize owns a 0.75-hectare parcel of co-planted Chardonnay (two-thirds) and Savagnin (one-third) there, planted between the late 1950s and the late 1990s. After whole-cluster pressing, the juice is blended and co-fermented in 20-hectoliter casks, where it spends 18 months on the fine lees with regular topping-up. As with the Chardonnay “Ammonites,” the marl soils here lend “Les Moulins” breadth and power, with the Savagnin contributing notes of spice to the dominant flavors of peach and apricot. Given the richness with which the wine enters the mouth, its finish is surprisingly tense and long, suggesting years of potential evolution in bottle."