Joseph’s no-nonsense old-school wines powerfully capture the Jura’s unique spirit.
Joseph Dorbon’s setup is simple: three hectares of organically tended vines on prime south-facing slopes above his home village of Vadans; a horse to help him plow; and a subterranean 16th-century cellar in which his effortlessly soulful wines slowly take shape. We met Joseph through Michel Gahier, and indeed the two men share a certain combination of dyed-in-the-wool Jurassien spirit and boundary-pushing thoughtfulness.
Vadans, a sleepy little village even for the Jura, contains soils of yellow marl, which tend to produce reds of great finesse and whites of chiseled complexity, and Dorbon’s wines follow suit; yet, like the greatest wines in the region, they are both deeply evocative of place and distinctly Joseph’s own. He works his land without chemicals, plows by horse—a difficult and little-encountered practice which he learned from his uncle—and harvests by hand.
His minimalist cellar practices are steeped in Jura tradition: spontaneous fermentations without temperature regulation; aging sous-voile for his white wines; minuscule (and sometimes no) additions of sulfur; and bottling of the white wines only after significant time in cask. Joseph’s evocative wines have garnered deserved attention since we first began our partnership ten years ago, and although he is now fully retired—with his talented nephew Pierre Laporte helming the domaine—we still have a few Joseph-made vintages to look forward to…
More on Joseph Dorbon here.
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