The Dirty Guide to Wine by Alice Feiring

Author:Alice Feiring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Dirt

The Jura department, bordered by the Saône Plain and the Jura Mountains, will always be linked to the dinosaurs as the limestone and clay marl soils date back to the Triassic and Jurassic Periods. But links to Burgundy are also often made as they are mirror images of each other, separated by the Saône.

Like nearby Burgundy, the Jura was once underwater and subject to the turmoil that would become the Alps. When the sea retreated, underwater caverns, now exposed, caved in and crumbled, resulting in rocks, sand, and silt. When the Alps were forming, the Earth slid and folded multiple times, trapping oysters, corals, star-shaped pentacrines, and all manner of sea creatures that don’t show up in Burgundy that often.

The resulting Jura soil, so fine for grape growing, is a stratum of marl limestone and schists, metamorphic and sedimentary. And it is also differentiated from Burgundy by being nestled into the undulating mountain foothills with a more extreme climate.

Opinions on where to plant which vine verge on religious doctrine. One winter, Pascaline and I were visiting Julien Labet in Rotalier, down in the south of the Jura. Labet is just around the corner from superstar winemaker Jean-François (Fanfan) Ganevat. In Labet’s cellar, there was a library of rocks in all sorts of colors: blues, terracottas, whites, yellows. He has an astounding 32 different cuvées, and with each one we were treated to a lecture on the wide spectrum of rocks in the region: blue and gray marls, some flat, some iridescent; rust-colored shaley marl; fossil-laden limestone. But the main issue here is the level of water retention and, of course, drainage, as the Jura tends to be wet. Labet picked up a slab of a rock he said was from the end of the Jurrasic Period—lias: a blue-gray clay rock of lime and sandstone. “This lias is the soil for Chardonnay. You can see it struggle.” I put it to my nose. It had the oddest smell, like patchouli.

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