100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Sunday roast chicken with thyme and new potatoes, cod with samphire and seaweed butter, blanquette de veau, and a little dry Mâconnais goat cheese.

Winemaking: Rijckaert harvests by hand, presses slowly and gently, and keeps the final press juices separate. Alcoholic and malolactic fermentations are spontaneous, driven by native yeasts. The wines are vinified and raised in 228- and 300-liter casks with very little new oak, staying in close contact with their lees: the aim is not to add oak aromas but to give the wine body and carry the expression of the terroir.

Vineyards and terroir: En Buland is a climat in the village of Vergisson, in the north of the Pouilly-Fuissé appellation. Set at about 350 meters and facing north-northwest, it is one of the cooler, later-ripening sites of the appellation, and its old Chardonnay vines grow on limestone soils that give a stony, mineral wine. Rijckaert works its vines without chemical herbicides, with ploughing, grassed alleys and copper- and sulfur-based treatments only.

Family and history: Belgian-born Jean Rijckaert began making wine in the Mâconnais in 1990 as co-founder of the Verget house, then created Domaine Rijckaert in 1998 with vineyards in the Mâconnais and in Arbois in the Jura. In 2013 he handed the estate over to Florent Rouve, a forestry and agricultural engineer turned oenologist and former manager of the Davayé wine school's Domaine des Poncétys, who keeps the Rijckaert spirit while bringing more freshness and tension. The Mâconnais wines are made in Davayé.

In the pictures: Florent Rouve, who runs Domaine Rijckaert, and the estate's barrel cellar (photos courtesy of Domaine Rijckaert).