The Jean-Marie Guffens White monochrome

"Jean-Marie Guffens, he is like the Gerard Depardieu of winemaking ". Talented, theatrical, generous, immoderate… He is always joking. The owner of 4,3 ha in Mâcon-Pierreclos and Pouilly-fuissé, is a man of character.

Exploding Jean-Marie Guffens. Always “dynamic”, like when he was 20 years old, he decided to leave Belgium and set on wine lands in Burgundy with his wife, Maine.

An artistic couple. Their formation, far from being in relation with the land work, was inside linked with wine… Theatre and architecture for him, Beaux-Arts for her…! For the beginning, the couple knows that “it consists in keeping the maximum of the grape potential and that the grape quality is both alpha and omega of great wines”. Then, it was in the 1970s: period in which everything is possible! So the couple takes one year to learn both “French and wine”…

Exclusively white Monochromes.

Jean-Marie Guffens is a fanatic of white wines for the 20,000 bottles per year everybody wants to buy and for the 350,000 bottles issued from the Domaine Verget of which he is owner too. His science seems to be as severed as his opinion on everything. “There is no analysis. We taste berries. If the skin is not ripened, the wine would not be mature”.

Mass is celebrated. Jean-Marie Guffens is an alchemist, who uses neither test-tube nor formula. He is a man of value more than a man of ethic. He broke the Chardonnay secrets and revealed its core.

2006, September 25 - © Bourgogne Aujourd'hui

Other information :
• Mâcon
• Pouilly-Fuissé
• Burgundy
• Domaine Guffens - Heynen