Burgundy Northern Satellites: Irancy & Saint-Bris

 BY NEAL MARTIN | AUGUST 21, 2018 

France is a country full of interesting wine regions, some globally renowned and others, smaller, less familiar and esoteric. Stop a passer-by in the street and ask if they know “Chablis” and nearly everyone will reply “white wine” and wait for you to give them a glass. Ask if they know “Irancy” and you will probably get a shrug of the shoulders or a “Never heard of her”. Irancy and for that matter, Saint-Bris, are like satellite appellations in a stationary orbit around Chablis. It takes little more than 10 or 15 minutes to drive from the centre of Chablis to either village, yet few make the journey or endeavor to taste the wines. But as prices in the Côte d’Or become increasingly prohibitive, alternatives such as Irancy and Saint-Bris become increasingly worth investigating. Therefore, during my week in Chablis, I organized a blind tasting of Irancy wines with the BIVB and visited a couple of its more reputed vignerons. Instead of lumping them in with my report on Chablis, I chose to keep these producers separate in order to give them well-deserved limelight and not least because, despite their proximity, their wines are totally different to those of Chablis. A third reason is simple. Some of their best wines taste damn good.

Looking down on the sleepy village of Irancy; you can see the vines in front of me but behind me are the cherry orchards

Irancy

Irancy is worth visiting just for the view from its highest contours. Park the car by the side of the road and inhale that soothing sense of nothingness, look up at the wide expanse of sky. Paris might just be “up the road” but it might as well be located in a different world from Irancy, where the only audible sounds are birds and the gentle breeze. Vines populate the amphitheater that looks down upon the village at the bottom, the upper reaches given over to cherry orchards whose fruit is whisked up to supply the capital city. The AOC only came into existence in 1998 – a relatively recent arrival on the Burgundy landscape. AOC rules dictate that there are no Premier Crus in Irancy, although one or two vineyards have gained repute, particularly Les Mazelots and La Palotte. Thierry Richoux showed me a map of the vineyards and put forth that those vineyards bordering the Yonne river, Palotte and Veaupessiot, are the finest although I personally have a lot of time for the fullness imparted by Les Marzelots.