2020 Les Matheny 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 cinderblock shed devoid of modern gadgetry.