This email just landed in my inbox. It seems we are getting ever-closer to the £100 villages wine – from a vintage of modest repute too – so is that over £350 in a restaurant? When, then, am I supposed to drink all of my Clos St.Jacques and Griotte from this domaine?* I remember when the Clos St.Jacques was £300 for 12 and from this same merchant too!

*You know that’s a rhetorical question – I’ll surely be opening them for my next Boeuf Bourguignon!

It’s already 5 years since I profiled the last version of Domaine Chanzy in Bouzeron and time has flown by for this, seemingly, restless domaine of over 30 hectares!

As you may remember, in 2012-2013 Jean Baptiste Jessiaume and his father became responsible for this domaine – just across the road from Domaine de Villaine in Bouzeron. What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was that they had been ‘hired by the owners’ to take responsibility for the winemaking, they were not the actual owners. Jean Baptiste said at the time was that they had bought the domaine as part of a consortium – seemingly then, they must have been minor partners. Subsequently, father and son Jessiaume left Chanzy after the 2019 harvest ‘to concentrate on setting up their own trading company‘ according to the current Chanzy team.

Since January, Max Blondelle is the new cellar-master and winemaker at Domain Chanzy, joining after working for nearly 15 years with Jean Pierre Confuron at Domaine Chanson. It will be too early to taste any major change of approach, but I anyway plan to visit Max in November when looking at 2019s. This has been a great source of well-made wine from the Côte Chalonnais, though also rather expensive for their appellations. The labels have had a workover – amongst other things, not surprisingly, removing the name of JB Jessiaume, above…