Description
REVIEWS
“Before Guffens, no one knew that Mâcon Pierreclos or even Pouilly-Fuissé could rival Corton-Charlemagne or Bâtard Montrachet. Now they do.” Andrew Jefford, The New France
“This peerless winemaker has surpassed himself with recent vintages.” Michel Bettane, The World’s Greatest Wines
INSIGHTS
He’s been called a “peerless winemaker” by France’s most influential wine critic, Michel Bettane, and a grower whose “tiny domaine is one the world’s pinnacles for Chardonnay.” The winemaker Bettane is referring to is Jean-Marie Guffens and the Domaine is that of Guffens-Heynen, based in the small village of Sologny in Burgundy’s beautiful Mâcon. For many of our clients Jean-Marie Guffens should need little introduction. After all, this outspoken, iconoclastic grower and his piercingly bright, pure wines – both under his Guffens-Heynen and Verget (micro-négoce) labels – have been in our white Burgundy portfolio since day one. While the choice of sites and bottlings (for the Verget wines) may have changed over the years, Guffens himself remains, to this day, the passionate, avant-garde grower we first met all those years ago.
The Verget style? Winemaker Jean-Marie Guffens perhaps summed it up best when he told us; “I am Flemish, I love purity.” In his watershed book, The New France, (Mitchell Beazley, 2002), Andrew Jefford described the Verget style in the following way; “Don’t buy Verget wines looking for the kind of cheese paste, farm straw richness of traditional “funky” white burgundy; these are white wines made with the kind of ravishing purity, compelling sensual austerity more familiar among the greatest winemakers of the Saar, the Ruwer, or Alsace.” We could not have put it better ourselves. In other words don’t expect to smell the popcorn, smoke, sulphite & lees notes that are typical of so much white Burgundy. In fact, Guffens believes that lees stirring and sulphites are embellishments used in white Burgundy to disguise shortcomings (much as dosage and lees aging are used in Champagne). He therefore minimises his use of sulphur. He wants you to taste the fruit in all its purity.
Increasingly, we are shipping more and more of Guffens’ wines from the south. These excellent additions to our portfolio encompass two superb Provençal Roses, and a deliciously motley collection of reds and whites, all fine values and bottled under screwcap. The wines are crafted from both Guffens’ Tourette’s estate fruit – just outside the beautiful Roman town of Apt between the Vaucluse and Luberon mountains – as well a fruit from external growers with whom Guffens’ has developed a close, qualitative relationship. All the Verget du Sud wines are made by Guffens at his cellar in Apt.
