JEAN-BAPTISTE SOUILLARD

Vins de Garde

Jean-Baptiste Souillard is a young, talented producer making waves in the Northern Rhône utilising his own land and bought-in (négoce) fruit through the extensive network he cultivated during his time as a consultant. Jean-Baptiste works out of a tiny, medieval cellar in the hills above Andance, a small town between Ampuis and Tain-l’Hermitage.

Souillard comes from a winemaking family but instead of joining the family business, he chose to study and travel, gaining experience in Australia and New Zealand before returning to France and spending pivotal time at Château Latour in Bordeaux and Comte Armand in Pommard (where he worked with one of our superb Burgundy producers – a young Benjamin Leroux).

Burgundy profoundly transformed Souillard’s view of vinification and he wanted to move towards a more Burgundian approach of vinifying and bottling each vineyard separately. Souillard wanted each lieux-dit and terroir to fully express itself. This meant stepping away from the tradition of the region and forging his path into something new. It was simple, one parcel equals one wine.

Souillard is a champion of previously untapped, old-vine sites in the hills of Saint Joseph and Crôzes-Hermitage at the têtes de coteaux—or ‘the top of the hills’. Within Crôzes-Hermitage Jean-Baptiste favoured sights of granite soils in the northern part of the appellation as opposed to the galets roulés found in the flat, south part where wines often lack concentration and distinct character. For his red wines, Jean-Baptiste seeks late-ripening sites allowing the fruit to attain full maturity with plenty of freshness. His pursuit to express each terroir translates into producing almost 30 different red and white wines, each with varying and distinct character.

In the cellar, Jean-Baptiste keeps intervention low, led by intuition. He likes to use as many whole clusters as possible. The reds are vinified in stainless steel tanks with spontaneous ferments, extraction is delicate, only pumping over. Pressing is done in a small vertical press and the wines are aged in used 228-litre barrels only. Minimal sulphur is used and Jean-Baptiste likes to rack his wines to help aid against the reductive tendency of Syrah. The reds are bottled unfined and unfiltered.

Souillard favours wines the French call “vins de garde” or, wines that are meant to age. His wines are serious, intense and thought-provoking. They are certainly some of the most interesting to come out of the region in a long, long time. A producer to watch.