Domaine de la Touraize Arbois Trousseau “Les Corvées” 2022

"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.

Domaine de la Touraize owns a 1.95-hectare parcel of Trousseau planted in 1972 in the southwest-exposed Les Corvées vineyard, whose warmth-retaining soils of gravel over marl are particularly suited to the variety. The bunches are manually harvested and lightly crushed, and fermentation occurs during a three-week maceration with occasional pump-overs and no punch-downs. This delicate extraction allows the fruit to remain lithe and supple, while still showing more color, weight, and depth than the Ploussard, as one would expect from the variety. Raised for one year in a combination of 80% large foudres and 20% terracotta jar, “Les Corvées” is chiseled, driving, and concentrated, built around kinetic energy rather than excessive structure."