Domaine Valois · Combe de Sereins · fondée 1834
Savagnin and Chardonnay from eleven hectares of blue marl.
Three cuvées a year. No shop. A list.
Act IIOrigin
The Combe de Sereins holds its cold. Budbreak arrives twelve days after the valley floor — and the fruit keeps its acid through the last week of October.
Bajocian limestone at 412 metres. The topsoil is thin enough that the roots gave up on it generations ago.
Every parcel picked by hand. Not as philosophy — the slope simply refuses machines.
Act IIICraft
From the cutting of the stem to the press, never more than ninety minutes. The press cycle runs four hours at 0.4 bar — slow enough that the juice arrives clear, and nothing needs to be taken away later.
228-litre casks, never topped. The voile forms in the second spring, or it doesn't — the casks that refuse it are bottled young and never carry the name. No new oak has entered the cellar since 1978.
Unfined, unfiltered, one racking in its life. Each cask is bottled in a single March morning, by gravity, before the cellar warms. What settles in the bottle belongs to the wine.
Act IVLes Cuvées
The estate wine. Savagnin from the four coldest parcels, thirty-eight months under veil. Walnut skin, dried orchard fruit, a saline line that outlasts the glass.
A single walled half-hectare the frost never quite reaches. Topped-up élevage, the only wine in the cellar kept ouillé. Stone before fruit; it opens on the second day.
Six years and three months in the dark north corner of the cellar. Released only in vintages when the veil holds the full term — four times in the last decade. 620 millilitres; the angels take the rest.
Act VAllocation
There is no shop. Allocations are offered in the order the list was joined, by letter, each February. Roughly a third of requests can be honoured in a given year — the rest carry forward. We would rather you wait than the wine.
Write to us. Tell us nothing but your name and where the bottles would rest.