Jean-François Ganevat’s family has been in the region for centuries, dating to at least the 1600s, and likely earlier. He grew up in the winery and vineyards, working side by side with his parents. After formal training in Beaune, he went to work for Jean-Marc Morey in Chassagne, where he stayed for 9 years as the estate’s maître de chai. In 1998 he returned to the Jura and took over the family estate. Ganevat is notoriously meticulous in both vineyard and cellar. For all that attention to detail, he is also prodigious in the number of cuvées produced each vintage, yielding as many as fifty separate bottlings depending on the vintage. Including himself and his sister Anne, the domaine employs 9 full-time, year-round workers to manage the winery and the 8.5 hectares of vines. At harvest, the grapes are destemmed manually, with each grape individually cut from the bunch with scissors, leaving just a half-centimeter of stem. It’s this kind of commitment that makes the wines as good as they unquestionably are. Ganevat’s wines also stand out stylistically, in particular those that are aged sous voile. Firstly, like all the best producers, Ganevat does not use cultured yeasts to initiate the veil, sadly a very common practice in the region. More uniquely, his research into the Jura’s winemaking history has convinced him that the use of smaller Burgundian barrels for sous voile wines is a relatively recent development. So Ganevat uses much larger vats, resulting in proportionately less contact with the veil, lower evaporation per volume, and therefore a less pronounced oxidative quality and a lively freshness that’s more associated with the ouillé Jura wines.
