2025 Domaine Francine & Olivier Savary Chablis Vieilles Vignes

Notes

For generations the Savarys grew grapes around Maligny,just north of the town of Chablis, and sold them to the coop, and there was so little money in it that Olivier's grandfather took a job in Paris and his parents never farmed at all. Olivier went to wine school in Dijon anyway. In 1984 he and Francine took on a single hectare as sharecroppers and sold most of what they grew in bulk, which is how things might have stayed if a childhood friend, Jean-Marie Raveneau (yes, THAT Raveneau), hadn't pushed them to bottle under their own name, and introduced them to Kermit Lynch. Today the domaine runs about 20 hectares of estate fruit spread across Maligny, Villy and the plateau above Lignorelles. Farmed with hedgerows and covercrops between rows, the vineyards hum with biodiversity. Sons Mathieu and Maxime now carry the day-to-day with their parents still in the cellar and the rows. The winemaking is deliberately simple: hand-sorted fruit, fermentation and malolactic in stainless steel, and oak only where the power and concentration leant by an old parcel can carry it.