La Soufrandiere

When people ask us who they should visit in France to see what is happening at the cutting edge of quality viticulture, the Bret brothers are always one of the first names to tumble from our lips. And the work in the cellar is of equal standard: these are wines lighting up the great terroirs of Burgundy’s southern reaches.

The La Soufrandière story began in 1947 when Jules Bret purchased an old property with a single hectare of vines Pouilly-Vinzelles “Les Quarts” in the hamlet of Vinzelles. By the late 1970s, Jules and his son, Jean-Paul Bret, had grown the estate to 4.55 hectares, acquiring plots of vines adjoining their existing holdings. At this time, the farm was still operating under a share-cropping scheme, and the grapes were taken to the Co-operative. 

Living in Paris, the young brothers would spend most of their summers at the Vinzelles property ‘fishing, picking mushrooms and discovering wine’. Over the years, they developed a strong connection to the region and became increasingly drawn to the relationships between soil and vine. By 1991 they decided to follow a career in wine and formative experience in Burgundy and California followed. In particular, their interactions with Jean-Marie Guffens in Pierreclos, and Dominique Lafon, in Meursault would profoundly influence their ideas in the early years. 

As we have said from our soapbox many times before, there are countless, more expensive white Burgundies from the far more famous terroirs of the Côte de Beaune that suffer by comparison with the wines from this Mâconnais progressive.

The cradle of the domaine is an ideally situated east-facing slope of Vinzelles called Les Quarts, a four-hectare vineyard on Bajocian limestone with a high silica/quartz content. The topsoil is only 20 to 30cm in depth before the roots plunge directly into the mother rock and, in some sections, can be scraped aside by hand to reveal the bare limestone. They also farm in neighbouring Les Longeays, a continuation of Les Quarts. A more recent acquisition, in 2016, is five hectares of beautifully sited St-Veran and Pouilly-Fuissé from an existing organic estate. Today La Soufrandière covers just under 12 hectares of prime sirloin Mâcon. 

Underpinning their wines’ vibrancy and mineral intensity, the brother’s exhaustive and precise vineyard management is second to none. Influenced by Dominique Lafon, from their very first vintage, the brothers opted for organic and biodynamic farming and are today Demeter certified: highly unusual in a region not noted for its conscientious, natural wine growing. But neither is employing one vigneron for every 1.5 hectares of vines: the local average is one for ten. To cut a long story short, hand-harvesting, biodynamic treatments, intensive canopy management, hard pruning to limit yields and ploughing, including by horse, are the rudiments of the labour-intensive, earth-to-glass approach.

At the start of his journey, Jean-Phillipe would press his grape in whole bunches, as is fashion in Burgundy these days. Today, the fruit is delicately crushed to mix the juice and skins (to draw out phenolic content for structure and as a natural preservative), and no sulphites are added before the press. Following natural clarification, the juices are naturally fermented in used large format cask, vats or concrete egg. Maturation lasts between 11 and 17 months, depending on the cuvée, and total sulphites are limited to 20-40 mg/l split between post-press and bottling.

We don’t mean to speak for others but the reality is that it’s almost always the case that the wines of the Mâconnais (and therefore La Soufrandière) do not attract the same kind of lofty scores as the top names in the Côte de Beaune. This has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the kind of prejudice that is deeply ingrained in our wine culture (and therefore our wine writing culture). Let’s put it another way: if the same wines were labelled Puligny-Montrachet or the like, we would have to allocate them. The reason for the quality is relatively simple—Jean-Philippe and Jean-Guillaume Bret have extraordinary holdings and are widely considered amongst France’s finest and most meticulous growers.

Bret Brothers

We also work with several wines from La Soufrandière’s mico-negoce, Bret Brothers. It’s important to note that, as opposed to the more traditional négociants of the region, the brothers work exclusively with old-vine (minimum 40-year-old), single-plot vineyards, all of which are now either certified organic or in conversion. And they work only with growers whose vines they can control, or agree on all aspects of the viticulture process, all the way to harvest.

Furthermore, the brothers work most of these non-estate parcels themselves, according to biodynamic principles, and end up with yields around 50% below the regional average. The wines are then crafted with the same care and precision as the estate wines. Although a large number of cuvées are made under the label, on average, each parcel of vines produces only three demi-muids of wine each, roughly 200 cases.