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Cuzin worked for the post office before plunging into the wine game and farmed one hectare bio-dynamically in Quincie-en-Beaujolais.

 

JEF’s wine reminds me of his vineyards, alive. In the vines are wild herbs, strawberries, and flowers among very old and naturally low yielding vines (15 hl/ha). Some of the best wines in the Bojo are coming from village vines instead of the crus. They have the same southern exposure, soils and are on slopes.

 

His are very cold and because of this, his fermentations always start slow and take a long time. The 2016 grapes were placed into tank September 7th and did not finish fermenting until June 15th of 2017, with many interruptions. The longer that sugars remain unfermented, the greater the chance that lactic bacteria will consume the sugars, causing volatile acidity. It almost took 1 year to ferment this wine and CO2 or SO2 were not added to protect the wine. Try explaining this to someone who makes wine and watch the reaction as they try to comprehend what you just read.

 

JEF’s wines have a lot of volatile, but this acidity is checked with a super intense, lively, concentrated and ridiculous core set of fruit. If not for this, the volatile would overpower, but in conjunction with the fruit, the wine is intense, yet lively and fresh. Volatile acidity gets a bad rap these days and there was a reason you needed to wait decades to drink Bordeaux, Piemontese Nebbiolo and Madeira...... lots of volatile acidity..

 

JEF started in 2011, but is not completely sold on the Bojo because there are other places in France he loves, and the 2018 is the last year he worked in the Bojo. These are the last 400 bottles available anywhere. So be warned as once they are gone, they are gone!