Les Matheny 2020 Arbois Trousseau

Les Matheny’s Trousseau is a brooding, serious beast, bristling with energy and thickly textured. Its brash, iron-inflected nose erupts from the glass like a missile, with pitch-black, spice-drenched fruit battling for attention with the wine’s core of mineral-tinged leather and black pepper. Not for the faint of heart, this is a profoundly structured, ruggedly tannic wine that seems to demand cellar time, but—as with the atavistic, rough-hewn Bandol of Chateau Pradeaux—these are honest, proud tannins that are somehow charming despite their intensity. Few in the Jura are as talented as Emeric Foléat of the tiny Les Matheny domaine in Arbois. Having worked for eight years under the legendary Jacques Puffeney, who taught him the ultimate value in embracing risk and trusting the quality of his fruit to do its thing in the cellar without coercion, Emeric farms 3 ha in Arbois without the use of synthetic chemicals and raises his wines in a small cin- derblock shed devoid of modern gadgetry. Emeric takes each harvest as it comes, vinifying and aging certain parcels separately if the notion strikes him, keeping a cask or two under voile for an extra-long time if the underlying material proves worthy, and topping up his barrels occasionally, partially, and based purely on taste and instinct. Minute additions of sulfur, and even then only sometimes, are the only adjustments he makes to his bold, assertive, deeply personal creations. To discuss the white wines of the Jura as either “topped up” or “oxidative” is to impose a strict binary on what is in fact a broad con- tinuum. The greatest white wines of the Jura are never monolithically oxidative, even in their most extreme form (the inimitable Vin Jaune), and the skilled vigneron balances oxidative notes with elements derived from the voile—and always with the ultimate aim of enhancing rather than overwhelming fruit-acid-mineral interplay. These are wines free of shackles—simultaneously tough and bare-knuckled whites, brazenly structured reds that scoff at the dainty, almost apologetic extraction common for such thin-skinned varieties. While both enologist and marketer alike may consider Les Matheny a baffling operation, those who value character in wine will find a deep well of authenticity and beauty here.