The
wine-grower has thus spent many long months cultivating and protecting his
vines, and now comes harvest time, which will reward his hard work and cause
his fears and anxieties to evaporate.As elsewhere in France, we produce wine by traditional fermentation methods (alcoholic and malolactic). Our uniqueness in France is the Savagnin grape.
As far as this grape is concerned, to produce Yellow Wine it is harvested, often late, in the second half of October, so as to achieve optimum maturity.
Pressing produces a must which is initially processed using white wine-making techniques: SO2, racking, fermentations which are slow and complete, to produce a dry wine which contains no more fermentable sugar. There now begins a maturation process which is profoundly original, and which seems to challenge the rules of wine-making. Once drawn off, the wine is stored in 228 litre oak casks, which have preferably already contained Yellow Wine or Burgundy, and which are not topped up so that a yeast flor, or skin, which ought normally to adulterate the wine by giving it a sharp vinegary taste and make it unfit for consumption, may appear and develop naturally on the surface.
It so happens, however, that in the Jura, and only in the Jura, there are specific yeasts, Saccharomyces Bayanus of the Saccharomyces Oviformis species, which cause very slow oxidation and this is what gives the wine its unique "yellow wine flavour".
To complete the yellow wine maturation process, the wine must be left like this in tap, without topping up, for a minimum statutory period of six years and three months. In the Jura this process, which would produce vinegar everywhere else, culminates in an exceptional wine.
At the end of these six years of cask maturation the yellow wine is bottled. It may then be kept for several decades, or even several centuries in the case of the great vintages, which retain and develop all their qualities.
