Emeric Foleat in his no-nonsense cave at Les Matheny.
Over the past decade or so, the Jura has gone from the outer fringes of the US wine market to its rightful place in the canon. While it may still be largely overlooked by the average conspicuous consumer of blue-chip Burgundy, its wines provoke far fewer wrinkled noses and confusion than before. Rosenthal Wine Merchant has long been a pioneering advocate for the Jura, struggling to convince the market of the brilliance of Jacques Puffeney—the first ever grower from the region to be imported— for many years before the wines eventually achieved legendary status.
While Jura wines may no longer shock with their newness, but they can certainly still shock with their sheer force of personality. Take, for instance, the newly arrived 2022 Poulsard from Emeric Foléat’s Les Matheny—a wine of such spellbinding beauty and stupefying somewhere-ness that it can bring one right back to those early days of Jura discovery, to the gnomic power of the pale liquid inside those wax-topped bottles of Puffeney.
It is no accident, perhaps, that Emeric worked for 10 years alongside Puffeney before founding his own winery. In Jacques’ modest cellar beneath his house in Montigny-les-Arsures, Emeric learned the virtues of restraint and the value in trusting one’s fruit; he learned to act as shepherd rather than “winemaker,” and his wines at Les Matheny embody that philosophy arguably more emphatically than even Puffeney’s did. Inside a cinderblock shed filled with weatherbeaten casks and decades-old equipment, Emeric guides into existence wines of breathtaking expressiveness and individuality—wines which immediately found an eager audience among our Jura-primed clientele when we commenced our relationship in 2016.
While the entire scope of Les Matheny’s production possesses the power to dazzle—Emeric’s Chardonnay, for instance, is a master class in thoughtful voile-management—the 2022 Poulsard deserves a spotlight of its own. From meager-yielding vines in Arbois planted in 1943, Emeric produces but a single cask of Poulsard even in a full harvest like 2022—a 15-hectoliter barrel whose grungy exterior (it has been used for almost 40 vintages, after all) belies the enchanting wine held within. Vinification and aging are straightforwardly anti-tech: full de-stemming, spontaneous fermentation with no temperature control, three-week maceration, aging for 18 months, and bottling without fining or sterile filtration.
Poulsard tends to get characterized as a pale, light-bodied wine, and while many do fit that mold and are produced in a manner that emphasizes it, Emeric’s—like Puffeney’s before him—has real depth, real texture, and a rarely encountered boldness. It is the product of ancient vines, wild fermentation, and long maceration, and, like its distant cousins to the west in Burgundy, it combines grace and power in seemingly paradoxical fashion.
Emeric’s 2022 Poulsard dazzles with its nose alone: cardamom, rose petals, roasted root vegetables slathered in cinnamon; earthy but pure, and overflowing with the kind of spice whose siren song led men to treacherous sea voyages in centuries past. The palate, sappy and succulent, echoes the nose in its complexity, yet it glides, lifts, and swells effortlessly, leaving clinging, cleansing stoniness in its wake. It’s a wine that made us fall in love with Poulsard all over again.
More on Les Matheny here.
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