Vintners such as the Bret brothers are ensuring the Maconnais is known for more than mediocre chardonnay.

By Elin McCoy
Bloomberg Markets, August 2008

In a vast, echoing hall in Burgundy, 136 winemakers from the region's Macon district are pouring samples of their chardonnays. I scan the room and spot a crowd gathered around a smiling vintner with a soul patch and floppy hair who's filling glasses as fast as he can.

I rush over and discover the rich, savory whites of the talented Bret brothers: Jean-Philippe, bottle in hand, and his younger, slightly taller sibling, Jean-Guillaume. They're part of the new wave of winemakers quietly revitalizing this pastoral area once known only for bargain-basement chardonnays.

The wines Jean-Philippe is offering are anything but. Though all are made from the same grape, one tastes ripely fruity; another, fresh and minerally; and still another, succulent and powerful.

The Maconnais in southern Burgundy is a wide valley of charming villages and gentle hills planted with almost three times the acreage of chardonnay as the famous Cote d'Or farther north. The top wines in the Maconnais don't achieve the rich complexity of the finest Batard-Montrachets, Meursaults and Puligny-Montrachets in the Cote d'Or, but at one-third the price (or less), they're great buys.

``Jean-Phi,'' 34, and ``Jean-Gui,'' 32, took over La Soufrandiere, their family's small domaine in the village of Vinzelles, nine years ago. A cluster of white-shuttered, 19th-century buildings hidden in trees is surrounded by vines. ``We lived in Paris but spent our summers here,'' Jean-Philippe says the day after the tasting. ``It was the dream of our childhood to make wine from the estate grapes. Our father and grandfather sold them to the local co-ops.''

Most of the district's 9,000 growers still do. That's changing slowly as a younger generation decides the challenge of making and bottling its own wine is worth the effort. What's given many confidence is the mini-invasion of superstars from the Cote d'Or such as Anne-Claude Leflaive and Dominique Lafon, whose premiers crus Puligny-Montrachets and Meursaults, respectively, sell for $125 and up. Lafon has been buying up acres of vines for a decade. ``Vineyards in Macon are far cheaper and easier to find than in Meursault,'' he says.

The co-ops mix grapes from all over the Maconnais to churn out low-personality plonk. The idealistic Bret brothers, like the area's 25 or so other top vintners, look to old-fashioned, artisanal methods to achieve quality. They eliminated herbicides and pesticides and handpick grapes at peak ripeness.

The Brets, whose Web site features a rock-music-backed video of their antics at harvest time, are hardly stuck in the past. They worked separately in California at estates such as Newton and Ridge Lytton Springs. Jean-Phi did a stint with Lafon, who follows biodynamic methods the brothers adopted at La Soufrandiere. And both worked for flamboyant Belgian theater producer Jean-Marie Guffens, a trailblazer for quality wine here two decades ago. Like Guffens, the Brets also make wines from purchased grapes, which they sell under their Bret Brothers negociant label. ``We try to select the best climat of old vines in each village,'' says Jean-Phi, referring to microparcels of land. The task is made easier by longtime family friendships.

As we taste more bottles over a swordfish dinner in New York a couple of weeks later, Jean-Phi whips out a map. ``This Pouilly-Fuisse La Roche comes from stony terroir in Vergisson, with the famous Roche de Vergisson looming above it,'' he says as he points at a dot with his table knife. ``The wine's minerality comes from the limestone.''

Unlike the Cote d'Or, the Maconnais has no official hierarchy of vineyards, with premier and grand cru designations, and there's no agreement on which are the sweetest spots. That means winemakers can't charge more based on reputation, but it frees ambitious ones to create buzz for their own discoveries.

Traditionally, the best Macons are Pouilly-Fuisses, Pouilly-Loches and Pouilly-Vinzelles from the far south. It's no surprise then that 8 of the Brets' 15 wines are from those appellations. The rest come from Saint-Veran, Vire-Clesse and standout villages such as Cruzille and Uchizy.

What's next? ``We're going south, to Beaujolais,'' Jean-Phi says with a smile. ``Now that's a region that needs rescuing.''

Columnist Elin McCoy is based in New York. emcwine@aol.com

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