2024 Domaine Frantz Chagnoleau St-Véran "Montchanins"

Notes

If I had to nominate one Burgundy producer into a quality-to-price ratio competition, it might well be Chagnoleau. There’s a particular kind of wine where most if it never makes it to the shelf because everyone along the way keeps a case for themselves: the winemaker’s fridge, the importer’s fridge, the retailer’s fridge. Frantz Chagnoleau makes those wines. He grew up in the Charentes, studied oenology in Bordeaux, and learned the Mâconnais working for Olivier Merlin before setting up on his own with his wife Caroline Gon, who spent years as the winemaker at the Lafon family’s Mâcon domaine down the road. Together they farm 6.8 hectares, certified organic, some of it worked by horse: a single walled block of Mâcon in Saint-Albain, and a scatter of tiny high-altitude parcels in Chasselas, Prissé and Vergisson that supply their Saint-Vérans and Pouilly-Fuissés. Frantz considers the Chasselas slopes his best plots: top of the hill & full southern exposures, with La Roche on 70-year-old vines and À la Côte perched at 400 meters on red earth where frost is a yearly worry. Cellaring takes place with native yeasts, long lees contact, old barrels and foudres with a token new one each year, and a meticulous commitment to quality, even if it means stopping picking mid-harvest if a parcel isn’t ready. These are deeply wonderful Chardonnays with real tension and a mineral tingle, priced like Mâcon and drinking like something from an hour north in the Cote D'Or.