Antoine Couly

(Bugey, France)

Photos by our friend Zoé Boinet, from a recent visit to Antoine

Bugey and the Savoie, both French alpine foothill regions near the Jura, are fastly becoming areas of choice for fledgling winemakers in France. While the Jura continues to become the fetishist’s region of choice, with an inverse ratio of price to availability on bottles increasingly the result, Bugey and Savoie are areas that, to me, are really beginning to come into their own, producing fresh, personal and exciting wines in spades.

Antoine Couly, a reclusive music lover and former devotee of rave, recently began his own project after by chance, spending harvest at the heralded Domaine Labet in the Jura Sud. Whereas some of Labet’s wines see sulfur additions and some don’t, Antoine, like the majority of the new guard in French natural wine, strictly produces wines sans soufre. There is painstaking effort in Antoine’s juice that really shows in the glass, and every cuvée sees at least a year of elévage in wood, adding subtle layers of complexity and character to already strikingly nuanced fruit.

Recently, over a bottle shared with friends both wine freaks and not at Chambre Noire in Paris, we were all taken aback by the balance and straight up deliciousness in Antoine’s Gamay, and finished the 750 in about five minutes. Fresh in the cool climate Alpine sense, with delicately warming red fruits and an appealingly bitter mineral depth that a touch of oxygen can bring, this was the perfect early evening apéro bottle on a cold Paris evening.

Cret du Jour 2019 (black wax)
Gamay
$35

The free run juice after maceration

The Jura influence hits immediately on the nose with a sleek reduction that seamlessly leads straight into a palate of bright red fruits and crystalline alpine freshness; this is delicate yet robust, and effortlessly balanced from top to bottom.

Cret du Jour 2019 (red wax)
Gamay
$35

The pressed juice after maceration

A touch more robustness on the bottom end than the black wax version

Bigarrée 2019
Gamay
$38

Old vines. Drinks almost like a combination of the two Cret du Jour versions, along with a unique tonic quality not to be found in either of the other two.