Domaine Feuillat-Juillot

Françoise is the daughter of Michel Juillot, the great name of Mercurey, and fell, as her own website puts it, dans une cuve toute petite, into a vat as a small child. She married into the other kind of Burgundy family: her father-in-law was Michel Feuillat, the professor at the Dijon oenology faculty whose research on lees and autolysis every white-wine maker in the Côte has read without knowing it. The Guide Hachette drew the obvious conclusion: she “had every asset to conjugate wine in the feminine.” Business studies in Paris, winemaking at Dijon, and then in September 1989, at the southern end of the Côte Chalonnaise, she went into partnership with Maurice Bertrand, a Montagny grower with nine hectares who sold most of his wine in bulk. Under the name Bertrand-Juillot they took the domaine from five thousand bottles to sixty thousand. Bertrand died in 2004, and that year Françoise bought the whole estate, with the help of a group of investors who formed a land company for the purpose (the premier cru cuvée Les Grappes d’Or, created that year, carries their name), kept the two employees, renamed it Feuillat-Juillot, and from then on sold every bottle herself.

Camille, the eldest daughter, is the winemaker and associate owner now; the cuvée that carries her name, first made in 2013, was the first the domaine kept apart for her. Her brothers Victor and Louis each have a premier cru named for them: Victor three barrels of centenarian vines inside the Coères, Louis the old vines of a full-south hillside. In April 2024 a magnum-only Cuvée Paul announced the arrival of Camille’s son. Four generations are now on the labels. The three words painted over the door are the house’s own: passion, émotion, élégance.

Les trois principes directeurs de notre style sont la passion, l’émotion et l’élégance.

Françoise Feuillat-Juillot

Montagny is the southernmost appellation of the Côte Chalonnaise, white only, across four communes (Buxy, Montagny, Jully, Saint-Vallerin), in what Françoise calls “the big Jurassic Montagny amphitheatre that’s so perfect for the Chardonnay grape.” It has forty-nine premier cru climats, more than any appellation in Burgundy except Chablis, on Bajocian limestone and Liassic marl; two-thirds of the wine goes through the Buxy co-operative, which is why an independent domaine of fifteen hectares matters here as it would not elsewhere. The flagship, Les Coères (the Hachette calls it “the lighthouse of the appellation”) is the family’s largest holding, about four hectares of vines averaging sixty years and some past eighty, mostly east-facing on a shelf with a north wing: the shelf gives the richness, the wing the tension. Les Jardins is a warm south-facing plateau on limestone that drains like a sieve. Les Grappes d’Or is six small parcels of old vines across the premiers crus. Les Burnins, full south, gives the organic pilot cuvée La Natur’Elles. The village wines come from Les Crêts, a hectare on the stony heights above the village, and from two young parcels planted 2010 to 2012 that make the Cuvée Camille. There is one red: twenty ares of sixty-year Pinot in Les Moulins, twelve hundred bottles.

Herbicide stopped the year she bought the domaine; every vine is ploughed, yields held well under the permitted level, treatments minimal. HVE in 2021, then organic conversion and the Ecocert certificate in 2024; the Natur’Elles bottling was the trial run. Every grape is picked by hand and every parcel vinified apart. Françoise was among the first in Montagny to install temperature-controlled tanks, and most of the range stays in them: fermentation, malolactic and eight months on the fine lees in steel, which is why the Jardins and the Grappes d’Or taste of fruit and rock and nothing else. The Coères and the two sons’ cuvées go to wood: 350- and 500-litre Berthomieu barrels, lightly toasted, used for four or five wines, only a tenth of them new. And since 2018 she has been trying terracotta, and Châtillonnais oak for the Cuvée Paul. After two years of trials, L’Audacieuse from Les Crêts and L’Originel from the premier cru are raised entirely in jars. The aim, in the estate’s own words, is “wines that express the quintessence of each of their terroirs.”

The big Jurassic Montagny amphitheatre that’s so perfect for the Chardonnay grape.

Françoise Feuillat-Juillot

Stephen Brook in Decanter, 18/20 on the 2013 Coères: “Rich, full, poised, pure and profound. This is excellent”; he named Feuillat-Juillot with Aladame and Cognard as the best growers in Montagny. Andy Howard MW, Decanter’s Montagny profile: “a small producer achieving consistently high quality.” Michael Edwards in The World of Fine Wine, 92 on the 2016 Coères: “old-vine succulence of ripe fruit and a textured, rounded mouthfeel speaks of very proper white Burgundy at prices most of us can afford.” Bill Nanson: the 2013 Coères “transparent, lithe and energetic… excellent.” Bourgogne Aujourd’hui: valeur sûre, “the elite of the Montagny appellation.” The Hachette has given the 2017 Crêts a coup de cœur (“mineral, unctuous and ample, subtle and racy”), the 2019 Grappes d’Or another, and two stars to the 2019 Coères, “tender, round, fat without heaviness, a well-typed Montagny, easy to love,” and to the 2019 Cuvée Camille, “an explosion of flavours… concentration, opulence and freshness.” Bettane and Desseauve have ranked the domaine the best of the appellation in the blind tastings.

Easy to love is the phrase. It is the white Burgundy the regulars ask for by name.

Rich, full, poised, pure and profound. This is excellent.

Stephen Brook, Decanter, on the Coères