Touraize’s Vin Jaune is produced in painfully small quantities—between 700 and 1000 bottles per vintage. Aged the requisite six years and three months in used 228-liter barrels in the winery’s attic, it comes across as fresh and lifted despite the panoply of natural-veil-derived oxidative flavors, with deep yellow fruits commingling with notes of fresh leather, pink salt, and candied almonds. It is rare to find a Vin Jaune so precise and refreshing as this, but it fits beautifully alongside the rest of A-J’s lineup stylistically.

André-Jean’s approach in the cellar is adamantly non-interventionist: he never adds yeasts, never chaptalizes, never adds sulfur before malolactic fermentation is finished, never pumps the wines, never fines, never filters, and keeps sulfur additions between 10 and 20 milligrams per liter. Despite a relative absence of controls, however, A-J’s wines are unfailingly clean, precise, and expressive—a reflection of his exacting, fastidious working regimen. Contrary to the majority of our imports from the region, most of Touraize’s white wines are topped-up in barrel, offering a bare-knuckled minerality uncomplicated by oxidative notes yet still humming with telltale Jura salinity and power. The two sous-voile Savagnin wines A-J does produce, however, are among the finest we have ever encountered, displaying a sense of focus and energy which unites them stylistically with their topped-up cellar-mates.