Collection: Charles Dufour / Françoise Martinot

“All my youth… [I always drank] a lot of old champagnes, ten years old at least. So I have a certain oxidative education,” renegade 0/0 Champagne producer Charles Dufour once told the wine writer Aaron Ayscough. “I never get sick of Jura wines, even when I drink them excessively. I’d need to drink liters of Vin Jaune to get sick of it.”

This kind of mindset which informs the hand behind some of the most fascinating, perhaps musical, wines from Champagne nowadays makes sense: let time have its way here in the southernmost extent of the wild Aube, where the 90 million year-old uplifted seabed soils share more with Chablis than they do the Grand Vallée to the north. What sets apart the many, many various cuvées of Dufour often is this play with oxidation, soil, & time, no better represented than the Unbreaking of The Circle in his integration of his father’s back-vintage wines into his current project, i.e., the 2004 Ballad of the Villages we have on current offer.

Let’s take a step back, however, to the beginning. Charles Dufour was born in Landreville in 1982, the 7^th generation winemaker of both his father’s and mother’s (the Martinot’s) families. But there wasn’t necessarily the presence of a Grand Domaine here in the Côtes des Bar – theirs was a story more common to this perennially underloved area of Champagne where, historically, an ocean of Pinot Noir would be shipped to the more fancied north of Champagne for blending via négociant. His father, however, started bottling a bit on his own: Robert Dufour et Fils. Conventionally farmed and vinified, sure, but the wines were of their own making from their own fruit. Charles, upon stepping into the domaine, started work to convert to organics when he was just 26 years-old. What inspired him, over and above, was the drinking of natural wines, meeting many natural vignerons, & several books, among them celebrated 20^th century oenologist Max Léglise’s latent work on natural vinification and his cautioning against previous advocation for sulfur.

It was not long before Dufour’s combination of his childhood – perhaps intuition then – experience with oxidative wines and long-aged Champagnes and the more vital, pyrotechnically immediate experience of a shockingly ‘alive’ wine (vin vivant; vin naturel) yielded results. His Bulles de Comptoir, just a few years after starting, was the house Champagne at NOMA of all places & his creativity in the cellar with consistently delicious and surprising expression earned him the nickname “The Selosse of The Aube.” In other words: there’s a reason for the renown!

This latest drop sees a broad range of his wines including the very rare Rosé from his mother’s holdings, part of the Martinot project, and the Ratafia-adjacent Liqueur de Comptoir which is perhaps the most beguiling & beautiful wine (we will call it wine) we have tasted in recent memory. Also featuring are the classic entry BdN Bistrotage from Martinot, his Vin de Comptoir (still Côteaux), Bulles de Comptoir classic and 2 bottles of his 2004 Ballad of the Villages, revivified from wine found in his father’s cellar.