Jane Eyre Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Aux Vergelesses 2023
£69.25
The wine
Highly perfumed, offering delicate red berry aromas and spicy undertones with a brambly edge. On the palate, a backbone of refreshing acidity and fine but firm tannins.
Aux Vergelesses is generally reckoned the best premier cru in Savigny-lès-Beaune, on the Pernand side of the valley where the slope faces south-east. Small parcels of low-yielding fruit were hand picked and destemmed, then fermented on indigenous yeasts in stainless steel. Jane Eyre works as a micro-négociant, buying fruit from growers rather than owning vines.
The producer
Jane Eyre
View all Jane Eyre winesJane Eyre is originally from Melbourne, and came to wine by an unlikely route. In 1998 she was working as a hairdresser when she asked a client, who happened to be the wife of the wine writer Jeremy Oliver, whether she knew of any winery that might take her for work experience. The Olivers suggested Burgundy. It has been an inextricable part of her life ever since.
Before settling there she built an enviable apprenticeship: Cullen in Margaret River, Felton Road and Ata Rangi in New Zealand, and Ernie Loosen in the Mosel. Four of the most exacting addresses in the New World and one of the great Riesling estates of the Old. She has been based in Burgundy since 2004, buying fruit rather than owning vineyards, which in the Côte d'Or is less a compromise than a discipline: without land of her own, everything depends on the relationships she has built with growers and on the judgement she brings to the cellar.
The wines are made in small quantities across a wide spread of appellations, and the style is consistent whatever the village: whole-bunch fermentation where the fruit merits it, restrained use of new oak, and bottling without heavy handling. The intention is transparency to site rather than a house signature imposed on top of it.
