About the producer
The Jura is one of France's most singular wine regions, a mountainous strip of green, rolling country wedged between Burgundy and Switzerland, home to some forty different grape varieties and styles unlike anywhere else. At its heart, in the hamlet of La Combe de Rotalier, just south of Lons-le-Saunier, Jean-François Ganevat, known to almost everyone as Fanfan, makes wine from a family estate with roots reaching back to 1650. For much of that history the family supplemented its grape growing with a dairy, producing milk for the local Comté cheese until 1976.
Jean-François trained under his father before spending time at the celebrated Domaine Jean-Marc Morey in Chassagne-Montrachet, absorbing a more Burgundian sensibility before returning home in 1998 to take over the family domaine. He now farms it biodynamically alongside his sister Anne, a natural decision for a self-confessed perfectionist with an obsessive eye for detail.
Across just eight and a half hectares, Ganevat grows seventeen different local varieties and gives each cuvée its own highly individualised élevage, often ageing whites on lees for years rather than months. It's an exacting, unhurried way of working that has made him one of the most influential names in natural winemaking, and one of the hardest to find outside the Jura itself.
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