Domaine André Bonhomme

Blessed are those who cook for free—though perhaps not so blessed as their next of kin. It was 1982. Jim’s brother was singeing his fingers as a stagier at Les Trois Marches in Versailles, whose wine cellar was curated by a man recently crowned France’s Best Young Sommelier. In a few short years Pierre Paillardon would be named the best sommelier in Paris, full stop. But for the moment he was chatting with the stagier’s sibling over a row of 1978 Burgundies.

The whites were showing beautifully—as well they should have, given some of the estates. But the sleeper was a surprise: a Mâcon-Viré, as they were then called, from a seven-hectare small fry named André Bonhomme. It turned out that Pierre wasn’t the only one onto it. Bonhomme’s Chardonnay was Mâcon’s sole representative on the celebrated wine list at Taillevent in Paris.

The bottle hardly had time to dry before Jim was tramping over slopes of limestone-pebbled clay to knock on Bonhomme’s modest door. He figured Pierre’s introduction would be worth an hour. But by the time André had fetched the final vintage from his cellar—diving all the way back to the estate’s 1956 founding—four revelatory hours had flown by. The man’s affability was exceeded only by the meticulousness with which he recorded the smallest detail of every season in the fields and the cellar. For him, every vintage was a trove of teachable moments. Some of his vines were barely teenagers at that point, but others had been planted in the 1920s by his parents and grandparents, back when local winemaking revolved around a village cooperative. Now André was showing why the medieval monks of Cluny—whose fondness for their sacramental beverage was not confined to Mass—had first developed vineyards in these parts. Gorgeous right out of the chute, with a Cotes de Beaune-style roundness and terrific acidity, Bonhomme’s wines also aged miraculously.

There was just one problem: all his production was allocated.

So it goes and so it went, but there’s always next year. And the one after that. And after that. Jim kept returning until 1988, when a tough spell for Bonhomme’s importer provided an opening for us. We’ve hung onto it ever since.

Today the estate’s Mâcon Villages and Viré Clessés—an appellation André helped to initiate in 1998—are crafted by his grandson Aurélien. Quiet and perennially tractor-tanned, Aurélien inherited his grandfather’s meticulousness along with the old vines, some bumping against the century threshold. There are 12 hectares now, split among distinct parcels of shallow red and white clay on limestone bedrock slanted east and southeast. The soils and exposures foster low-pH grapes in an era when the racy freshness that continues to mark Bonhomme’s wines is difficult for many Mâconnais producers to achieve. While others block or partially block malolactic fermentation in a bid to hang onto acids that are increasingly cooked out by the region’s warming climate, Aurélien has been able to carry out full conversions that preserve the domaine’s signature back-palate verve and creamy breadth.

It takes a lot of work. He farms organically and is one of the last in the appellation who still harvests the entirety of his production by hand. The intellectual labor is just as exacting amid the 21st century’s wild weather swings. “We have been repeating the same gestures for decades but the vintages are not alike—each year has its own character,” says Aurélien, who took over in 2008. “Extreme events like spring frosts and heat waves touching 43 degrees Celsius are no longer uncommon. So we’re pruning later to delay the vine in the spring. We keep grass in the rows of vines to keep freshness and moisture and preserve the soil fauna. There’s no more summer leaf-stripping in hot years, so that the leaves can protect the grapes from the sun.”

Focusing on pH above potential alcohol to determine when to pick each parcel, “we’re harvesting practically a full month earlier than my grandparents did,” he marvels. But it’s unpredictable. Sometimes you get a knuckleball vintage like 2021, which was weird precisely because it tracked the old-normal timetable of André’s heyday. This sheer variation underscores the double-importance of Bonhomme’s old vines: it’s not just the fruit they produce, but the intricate archives they come with.

“It is over the years that we know our terroirs better, which helps us to plan the harvest or the future vinification, like if a particular plot will be vinified in vats or in oak barrels,” says Aurélien. “The vines are older, and that permits us to be even more precise with the élevage based on a more intimate knowledge of each parcel’s potential.”

Fermented cool with indigenous yeasts and matured on lees for 12 to 20 months in a mix of stainless steel, oak barrels, and neutral casks (depending on the bottling), Bonhomme’s mineral-lined Chardonnays crackle with an elegant tension that made André a Mâconnais pathbreaker 40 years ago and sets Aurélien apart from many of his heat-battered peers today. The stylistic continuity is as striking as the 1976 he uncorked for Julien on a recent visit—from a hot year and a round vintage, yet still absolutely intact: a beautiful wine, and a benchmark for the legacy Aurélien steers by.

“It’s all the result of 50 years of work in the vineyard and winemaking on the part of my grandparents,” he emphasizes. “They certainly made mistakes—but that served them well later on, and saves us from repeating them. The style of the wines still rests on that classic balance. We’re looking for optimal maturity while preserving une belle fraîcheur.”