2021 Domaine de la Touraize Arbois Chardonnay Les Voisines

“Les Voisines” (“the neighbors”) comes from 2.35 hectares of Chardonnay spread among four parcels in Arbois: Curoulet, En Flandre, Les Corvées, and La Platière, with soils ranging from gravelly marl to calcareous marl to blue marl. The fruit is pressed whole-cluster, undergoing alcoholic and malolactic fermentation in well-used barrels of varying sizes, where the wine spends 18 months on the fine lees and is bottled without fining or filtration, and with just 20-mg/L of sulfur added after malolactic finishes. The barrels are kept full, in the ouillé style, and the finished wine displays bristling minerality unaccented by oxidative elements. Despite its recognizable varietal character and its purity of fruit, however, this is a forcefully saline, chiseled iteration of Chardonnay that could be produced nowhere else but the Jura.