Domaine Corsin

The torrid 1983 season had been so trying that Gilles and his brother Jean-Jacques had split their harvest into three batches. The one Jim had tasted emerged from malolactic fermentation with a loose-knit texture that frayed around the edges. But Gilles had partially blocked malolactic conversion in the second batch, and fully blocked it in the third. That was what he’d brought to dinner: a revelation stitched in bitter honey and back-palate verve that still buzzed with mineral-edged tension a decade down the line.

Joseph Corsin had started bottling his own wine here in 1936, so the family’s winemaking history was as old as the creation of Mâcon’s first official appellations—and they’d grown grapes longer still. But his grandson Gilles seemed to be feeling the region’s future in his bones. By the heat wave of 2003 it was impossible to ignore: 1983 may have been an extreme outlier in its time, but it was an eerie glimpse into Mâcon’s 21st-century “new normal.”

As one of the very first Mâconnais producers to master the art of blocking malo to varying degrees depending on vintage conditions—by means of cold stainless-steel maturation and careful barrel blending within their family-scale operation, where harvests are still done almost entirely by hand—Domaine Corsin got out well ahead of a curve that many neighbors are now scrambling on. But Gilles’ work in the cellar is only half of a story that also played out in the vineyards tended by his sun-tanned sibling. Jean-Jacques was a far-sighted steward of the family’s 13.6 hectares, whose 45 distinct parcels range from the Saint-Véran appellation to a prized premier-cru plot of Aux Chailloux in Pouilly-Fuissé.

“Our vines are very old,” says Jean-Jacques’ son Jérémy, who took his father’s reins in 2019 to extend the family line to six generations. “The fact of having pampered them for so many years has allowed us to keep them for a very long time. This is an incredible richness, because these old vines produce healthy grapes with a very nice complexity. Especially with global warming, their deep roots allow them to resist better in times of drought.”

The old vines are rooted at densities reaching 8,500 plants per hectare in 280-meter-high clay-limestone slopes that face southeast, east, and northeast—the latter exposures having proven especially valuable amidst Mâcon’s climbing temperatures. Jérémy has known them since childhood, but returned to the domaine after roughly a decade pursuing another passion that’s run in the family since his grandfather André: for high-performance automobiles. As a mechanic for Peugeot Sport’s Dakar Rally competition team, Jérémy honed a faculty for exactitude under extreme conditions—which is now part of the job description for every grape grower and winemaker in Mâcon.

Jérémy continues to pamper the family’s heat-tolerant vine stock with fine-tuned farming that’s evident in the grasses he cultivates between every second row—balancing rain capture with water retention, limiting erosion, and “controlling the vigor of the vines to avoid excessively intense production of large grapes.” While some nearby producers have taken to premature harvests to hang onto acidity, Domaine Corsin leverages four decades’ of Gilles’ meticulous experimentation to wait until grapes achieve phenolic ripeness, confident of finding their fullest expression in the vinification. Gilles continues to guide decision-making the cellar, where wine rests on fine lees in a mix of oak casks, barrels, and stainless steel to develop a multi- dimensional character that’s especially striking in the way these wines evolve in the glass. They have an uncanny ability to improve with air—even into a second or third day, as a sculpted minerality gains prominence amid the opening blush of fruit-forward generosity.

In a region where every year increasingly offers a crapshoot—from heat waves to hailstorms—the Corsins have long approached each of their bottlings as a puzzle that needs to be solved. With old vines, advantageous exposures, carefully stewarded calcareous soils, and ingenuity in the cellar, this estate shows that for some craftsmen there’s nothing like a stubborn challenge to inspire a set of uniquely compelling wines.