Is Jurançon the Next “It” Wine Region?
Stunning dry white wines are coming out of this Southwest France appellation, a region worthy of our in-depth tasting report. With 20 bottle recommendations.
There’s a well-known anecdote in France about how Henri IV, the first Bourbon king, was baptized in 1554 in the city of Pau with a clove of garlic and a few drops of the local sweet Jurançon wine rubbed on his lips.
I read this story en route to Southwest France this winter, and as I walked past the castle in Pau where the future king was christened, I found myself wondering what that baptismal wine must have tasted like, and what 16th-century drinkers would think of the region’s wines today. That’s because Jurançon is swiftly moving past its traditional reputation for sweet wines.
A growing number of independent winemakers—many farming organically or biodynamically and working with minimal intervention in the cellar—have turned their focus to dry wines. At their best, these wines can rival Loire chenin or white wines from the Jura for their tension, texture, sapidity, aging potential, and ability to express terroir. Jurançon is still an important sweet wine region, of course, but it’s also the source of some of France’s most compelling dry white wines.
The success of Jurançon wines, both dry and sweet, is thanks to the dynamic between its two most-planted grape varieties, petit manseng and gros manseng. These native grapes are well-adapted to the climate: Jurançon is one of the wettest wine regions in France, warm and humid, with up to 1200 millimeters of rainfall every year, but these grapes have thick skins resistant to botrytis and fungal disease.
Petit manseng, the offspring of savagnin and a sibling of chenin blanc, tends to dominate blends for sweet wines, as it can accumulate high sugar (and thus alcohol), but retains searing acidity. Gros manseng, meanwhile, is typically the majority in blends for dry wines. It’s less aromatic and intense, but it keeps the alcohol content of the dry wines in check. The two varieties complement and balance each other in this way between the two styles. (Despite the name, there’s some doubt as to whether petit manseng is closely related, if at all, to gros manseng.)
Petit manseng and gros manseng are grown mostly on Jurançon’s poudingues soil, or puddingstone, a fast-draining conglomerate that defines the majority of the region. “Petit manseng matures on the poudingues at 15 and a half percent alcohol,” explained winemaker Jean-Marc Grussaute of Camin Larredya. “And it can go up to 16, 17, 18, very easily, very quickly.”
Grussaute is among the earliest independent winemakers in Jurançon and has raised the profile of its dry wines. A former professional rugby player, Grussaute took over his family’s domaine in 1988 and converted the vines to organics and then biodynamics. He now farms a little more than 12 hectares across three different terroirs: poudingues, limestone, and alluvial gravel.
About 75 percent of his production is dry wine, labeled Jurançon Sec. It’s one of three different designations that can appear on the label of an appellation wine in Jurançon: the other two are Jurançon (sweet) or Jurançon Vendanges Tardives (late-harvest).
“In the past, you put the bad grapes into dry wine, and you saved the good grapes for sweet wine,” Grussaute told me, explaining that the creation of the Jurançon Sec designation in 1975 was intended to improve the quality of sweet wines, by setting a minimum amount of residual sugar for grapes to be included and thus diverting poor quality grapes to dry wines.
But Grussaute is one of the Jurançon producers who set out to craft exceptional dry wines with a capacity for aging. He poured some older vintages for me to taste, from as far back as 2004. They showed beautiful notes of dried mango, truffles, and hay. There was still plenty of fruit on the palate, and the phenolic pithiness that these wines can have in youth had resolved into a vibrancy on the palate.
The pivot to dry wines in Jurançon began with the rise of independent vignerons like Grussaute in the region. For almost 50 years after the appellation was established, there was only a cooperative in Jurançon; the first independent vine growers weren’t established until the 1970s and 1980s.
Among them were Grussaute and Jean-Bernard Larrieu of Clos Lapeyre. Larrieu is a third-generation farmer who took over his family’s domaine in 1985. The domaine’s vineyards are near the top of steep hillsides, at altitudes of up to 400 meters, facing south and southwest with a stunning view of the Pyrenees, just 25 kilometers away. Among his 18 hectares, Larrieu works one very unique parcel in fermage (a farming tenancy). It’s a vineyard with the oldest vines in the region, some more than 100 years old, a traditional co-plantation of petit manseng, gros manseng, and a bit of camaralet and courbu (or petit courbu, as it’s sometimes called).
On the day of my visit, everything was bright green and lush under clear skies after weeks of rain. Dusk fell as we tasted wines on the patio of the domaine, and in the distance fires dotted the slopes of the mountains, set by French Basque shepherds to open up pasture for their sheep to graze. Larrieu, ever the farmer, hopped on his tractor as dark fell to do some final work for the day, and I got the sense that he could have made the sharp turns down the steep rows wearing a blindfold, steering from memory after 40 years of working in these vines.
There’s a generation of younger producers who are continuing what Larrieu, Grussaute, and others began with Jurançon Sec. Franck Lihour of Domaine Castéra noted that there is a great opportunity for making dry wines in Jurançon because it’s a blank slate: there is no standard profile for the style yet. But he also emphasized that it will take a lot of work to learn more and continue to improve the wines.
Lihour practices plot-by-plot winemaking for all his wines, dry and sweet. The minimalist vinification process is the same for all of the wines. “We have so much difference between grapes, terroir, and so much to learn about it. For me, I don’t want to bring something new in the cellar,” he explained. To that end, his barrel room feels a bit like a viticultural research library, where you can taste the impact of different soil types, vine age, massale selection, and exposition on four different varieties aging in large format oak.
His friend and peer in Jurançon, Maxime Salharang of Clos Larrouyat, farms three hectares of vines on a thin band of Triassic limestone that runs through the appellation. It gives typicity to his wines, with beautiful key lime and lemon verbena notes and powerful, linear acidity. The wines are fermented and aged in used barriques for six months; they also see a bit of bâtonnage depending on the vintage. Different winemakers on different terroirs, with different approaches in the cellar—there’s no uniform approach in the region right now, and the different results are incredibly exciting.
The dry wines of Jurançon have thrilling potential, but its sweet wines are still a revered and essential part of production for independent producers, too. Even Salharang, who focuses on Jurançon Sec, makes tiny quantities of sweet wine from a segment of his vineyard where the vines produce smaller yields and higher sugar concentration. It’s a testament to his time working at Domaine de Souch, an iconic producer of sweet Jurançon wines and one of the very first independent domaines in the region.
Domaine de Souch was originally the project of Yvonne Hégoburu, who renovated the abandoned property and ran the winery with her son, Jean-René Hégoburu, after her husband’s death in 1987. Along with Larrieu and Grussaute, she was one of the first organic and biodynamic producers in the region, inspired by seeing these practices in Pomerol. (She passed away in 2023, but you can see her at the very beginning of the 2004 documentary Mondovino.) Today her son runs the estate, and I met with winemaker Emmanuel Jecker, who has worked at Domaine de Souch for 18 years.
“Fifteen years ago, as with many sweet wine appellations, demand fell,” Jecker said. “We had the luck that dry wines were increasing and an opportunity to develop their quality. So we had less damage than other big sweet wine appellations, and now the sweet wines are developing again.”
Not that that ever affected the domaine’s focus. The winery’s dry wines are outstanding, but Domaine de Souch is renowned for, and focuses on, its sweet wines, including Jurançon, exceptional Vendanges Tardives, and a wholly unique cuvée made with passerillage (dried grapes) called Marie Kattalin. There is an exceptional freshness and power in these wines that has to be tasted to be believed.
“We are making great dry wines in Jurançon, no doubt, but our very specific wine is sweet wine, because you cannot achieve balance like this everywhere,” Lihour of Domaine Castéra affirmed.
It would be easy to see Jurançon’s evolution as a pursuit of fashion—whether riding the tide of increasing dry white wine consumption, or counting on a resurgence in sweet wines. But the winemakers I met aren’t chasing trends. They are making the wines they’ve always wanted to make, shaped as much by curiosity and conviction as by vintage and place.
Jurançon may never be an “it” region. That might be exactly why it’s worth watching.
20 Jurançon Jams, Both Dry and Sweet
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