Hiding Out in the Jura: Sylvain Jacquot

How does greatness travel when the person making it refuses to?

Four years ago in Vienna, I drank an oxidative Jura Savagnin that made me sit up and notice. Its salinity was insane. It kept whispering something to me. But what was it saying? By the time I left Vienna with Covid, I had drained the Caveau du Val de L’Amour from Rund Bar’s stash. As it turned out, it was from his first commercial vintage, 2016.

Here’s the note I published on the old Feiring Line site.

This producer was all over the wine bars of Vienna. I just had to try it… and fell in love on the spot. Sylvain Jacquot works on 1.5 hectares and the Savagnin was raised oxidatively for four years. What a gorgeous wine. It has intensity, patience, maturity, wisdom, depth and the delicious energetic saltiness of a powerful wave on a beach when the weather is just perfect. Drink now or lay down.

Over the years, Sylvain’s were among the few bottles for which I would break my no checked baggage rule. I found them in Berlin or London but never in France. Every Jura fanatic I met—even in Japan, his biggest market—I asked: Know Sylvain Jacquot?

“Oh, Nicolas Jacob?”

“No. Jacquot, in Cramans.”

“Never heard of him.”