Maxime Dancoine took over the domaine of Bernard and Marido Bachellier, the last remaining vignerons in Aiton, in order to create L’Aitonnement.

Aiton is a small town in the French Savoie (serious mountain country somewhere... Read More

Maxime Dancoine took over the domaine of Bernard and Marido Bachellier, the last remaining vignerons in Aiton, in order to create L’Aitonnement.

Aiton is a small town in the French Savoie (serious mountain country somewhere between Grenoble and Geneva) where farming is hard in an obvious and kind of crazy way—sort of like farming on the side of a volcano. But if you can find the right ingredients in the Savoie (as in Sicily), you can make great wines.

And Maxime found the right ingredients. Again like Filippo, he picked up some old vines, including the 80-year-old (or older) Jacquère that goes into his Genesis bottling. And he got fascinating terroir: the soils are a mix of grey limestone and fractured shale on steep, south-facing slopes, up around 450 meters asl. With that sort of exposition grapes can ripen—even at altitude this high.

Maxime works hard to let those old vines and amazing sites speak. The vines were already organic when he took over and he has added biodynamic practices into the mix. He works by hand and adds minimal sulfur and no other chemicals. The wines finish malo naturally—there’s certainly no lack of acidity! If necessary, he is willing to filter—showing the kind of principled but practical, non-dogmatic approach that is the hallmark of so many great winemakers.