"As my comments confirm, the Vocoret team has once again produced some outstanding wines and if you're not familiar with them, you owe it yourself to check them out. You'll thank me for the suggestion." Allan Meadows, Burghound

Eleni and Edouard have only been operating their little (sub-5 ha) domaine for a few vintages, but they're already among Chablis' brightest stars. The first time I tasted the wine we were still under COVID lockdown. The importer shipped samples to a few of us in New York and we hopped on a zoom with Eleni and Edouard, who were sitting outside in the early-evening Chablisien sunshine. The wines were an incredible taste of the broader world and I couldn't wait to be able to share them with our friends and customers in New York.

In case you don't know the story, Edouard is from the Vocoret family of the rather large "Domaine Vocoret & Fils." Like many of his generation, he worked stages at wineries around France and then around the world. During the course of these studies he was exposed to small-scale biodynamic growers, which revolutionized his view of what vineyard work really is. What had seemed to be just labor -- merely work -- came to be something much more: the chance to know every single vine. Edouard began to believe that to make his kinds of wines, he would need to work on a small enough scale that he could, as he told us on that zoom, "control everything from the beginning to the end, to do as much by hand as possible." He has been able to begin doing that, taking over small, selected parts of family holdings.

Eleni came from a very different background. While Edouard was so deeply rooted in Chablis that he wouldn't consider a home any more than 2km outside of the commune, when they met on a stage in New Zealand, she didn't even like Chardonnay, having mostly been exposed to oaky, Austrian expressions. But that all changed when someone shared a bottle of 2005 Dauvissat with her. A little while later she was working with Vincent Dauvissat himself. And now, just a few years later, she's farming Chardonnay vines on her own domaine. 

They have developed a common philosophy and shared goals for their domaine. A good wine, they believe, must be complex and balanced, and never be tiring. The complexity is there in their vineyards, starting with the soils, they say. And the trick is to get to know the soils and to take care of them, so they can take care of the vines which will take care of the fruit. If you do all that, there just isn't too much left to do in the winery but get out of the way.