Get Thee to the Jura: Stéphane and Bénédicte Tissot

Nestled in mountains, the Jura wine region is utterly unique: With its alpine climate and higher elevation, the growing season proceeds well into the fall, with harvests routinely stretching into November (meanwhile this year, California is having it's earlier harvest ever, which started a couple weeks ago!). The mineral rich soils are built on a base of Jurassic Limestone (Jura is the namesake for the Jurassic Geological Era! We love rock facts here at Accent) which fosters vibrant acidity and pure fruit flavors in the delicate but quietly profound wines of the region.

Ask most people to point to the Jura on a map of France and they'll hesitate. It's a sliver of a wine region tucked against the Swiss border, east of Burgundy, small enough that its entire vineyard area today — around 2,000 hectares — would be a rounding error in Bordeaux. That smallness is not an accident of geography. It's the scar tissue of history. Phylloxera, two world wars, and the slow pull of easier crops (Comté cheese production, mainly) had by the mid-20th century reduced a region that once rivaled Burgundy in size down to a fraction of its former self. For decades, Jura wine meant something rustic and regional, a curiosity for locals and the occasional lost tourist. 

If you've had a reason to reconsider that, there's a good chance it traces back to one family: husband & wife team Stéphane and Bénédicte Tissot.

The estate itself predates them. Stéphane's parents, André and Mireille Tissot, founded the domaine in 1962 in Montigny-lès-Arsures, a small village outside Arbois, on land the family had farmed since Stéphane's grandfather planted vines there in the 1950s. Stéphane grew up in the cellar (he's talked about being small enough as a kid to climb inside the barrels to clean them) and made his first vintage in 1989, at nineteen years old. He took over the domaine fully the following year.

What happened next is the part worth lingering on. Early in his career, working an off-season stint at a vineyard in Australia, Stéphane opened a packet of commercial yeast — the same brand he used back home in the Jura. It stopped him cold. If wineries on opposite sides of the world were fermenting with the identical manufactured yeast, whatever "terroir" was supposed to mean was getting flattened before it ever reached the glass. Around the same time, a meeting with Nady Foucault of Clos Rougeard in the Loire reinforced the same instinct: that the real work of making distinctive wine happens in the vineyard, not the cellar. Stéphane stopped inoculating with selected yeasts and began the slow conversion of the estate to organic farming — one of the first in the Jura to do so. Certification followed in 1999. Biodynamic certification, through Demeter, came in 2004.

Today the domaine farms roughly 45 to 50 hectares across some of the Jura's most distinct terroirs — Les Bruyères, La Mailloche, En Barberon, Curon — parcels that sit on the region's characteristic mix of blue and gray marls, limestone, and clay. Rather than blending everything into a house style, the Tissots vinify parcel by parcel, producing something like 28 to 30 different cuvées across the five traditional Jura grapes: Chardonnay, Savagnin, Pinot Noir, Trousseau, and Poulsard. It's an approach that  respects and preserves the individuality of each plot, which is a big part of why tasting through the range feels less like sampling a producer and more like touring a region.

Stéphane has described himself, fairly, as more of a modernist in the cellar than the Jura's reputation might suggest. Many of his whites are topped up rather than left to age oxidatively under a veil of yeast. This is the exact opposite of the classic, sherry-like style the region is historically known for. But Stéphane hasn't abandoned that tradition either; his sous voile Savagnin and Vin Jaune are proof he can make excellent "old style" Jura wine when the moment calls for it. It's this range — reductive and precise on one end, oxidative and time-worn on the other — that makes the domaine such a compelling place to start if you're new to the region.

None of this happened by Stéphane alone. Bénédicte has run the commercial and business side of the estate for over thirty years, the partnership that's let Stéphane stay obsessive about the farming and the cellar without the whole thing falling apart around him. Ask him and he'll tell you as much himself.


All of this, of course, is all well and good, but there is nothing quite like tasting through a lauded series of wines, and realizing how excellent they really are. And we just received a tiny allocation of 4 Tissot wines. 


First, Stephane's Cremant de Jura: A traditional method (AKA built like Champagne) wine made with 100% Pinot Noir Grapes. The wine is vinified to Extra Brut levels of dryness, and is made without sulfur. The resulting wine shows intriguing notes of spiced pears, salted caramel, and toasty pretzel bread. It's simultaneously decadent yet anchored with a throughline of refreshing and balanced acidity.

"En Barberon" Chardonnay comes from 50-year old vines from a two hectare site planted to Bajocien Limestone and marl soils. The site yields extremely complex wines that are a series of contradictions: Dense fruit with a gossamer texture; pungent aromas of warm spices and herbs softened by ripened citrus. It tastes closer to a mineral, saline white Burgundy than to the tropical fruited wine you might expect from the name. (Sam: It is one of my favorite Chardonnays I've had the privilege of trying in the last year.)


The reds reflect a similar sense of powerful aromatics coupled with brilliant fruit and a rapturous level of complexity: The Amphorae aged Trousseau sees a lengthy five week maceration between the skins and the juice. The fruit character is both vivid and delicate, with pure aromas of fresh raspberry and attractive notes of smoke and violets. Ever so slightly larger in presence is the Sous la Tour Pinot Noir. The vineyard is considered an exceptional locale, even within the extremely well regarded holdings of the Tissot family. Limestone soils, with excellent sun exposure and elevation produce grapes with soaring acidity and racy flavors of currant and cranberry. With two years of barrel aging to soften the wine's angularity, the resulting product is an elegant blend of fruit and an appealing earthy nose.