Jean-Yves Péron

Jean Yves Péron is a talented vigneron born and rooted in Savoy, but with the soul of the indefatigable and curious traveler. A biochemist by training, he followed the call of wine to Bordeaux in the late 1990s, where he undertook training in enology. He moved from theory to practice by taking his first steps in winemaking in Cornas with the great Thierry Allemand, practically a legend of the northern Rhone valley. He later worked in Alsace, alongside the iconic naturalist Bruno Schueller, in the family domaine founded by his father, and then flew to distant latitudes: Oregon and New Zealand. With a baggage chock-full of experience, he returned to domestic shores by setting up an initial base of operations in the village of Chevaline, a couple of hundred souls in the alpine heights of the Montagne du Charbon, straddling the departmental border between Savoie and Haute-Savoie, oriented toward the fairy-tale Lake Annecy. A negociant's license obtained in 2011 enabled him to start a business with two other Savoyard vignerons, Raphaël Marin and Adrien Dacquin, until in 2017 he built a new winery inside a cave in the rocky heights of Albertville and began further collaboration with two Italian organic winemakers, Paolo Angelino, in Casale Monferrato, and Giorgio Barbero, in Asti.

Jean Yves Péron's vineyard is fractionated into numerous tiny parcels that make up a property of about 2 hectares, spread out over magnificent schist soils and facing south. The slopes are vertiginous, with elevations between 400 and 600 meters, overlooking Olympic Albertville and the Isère valley, which flows to the southwest. There, in the most natural way possible and using biodynamic principles, the native and most representative varieties of the area are raised: Mondeuse and Jacquère, accompanied by the rarer Persan, Bergeron and Altesse, some of which come from 120-year-old plantings. Processing is compulsorily done by hand, with harvests more akin to climbing than simple grape picking.

Jean Yves Péron's winery stands practically contiguous to his own vineyards, and winemaking continues the idea of non-interventionism applied in the field: spontaneous fermentations with no temperature control, avoiding the use of sulfites, filtrations, clarifications and stabilizations. Reds are generally made through carbonic maceration, while long macerations are reserved for white grapes. Agings often use used wooden barrels or even amphorae, and labels usually bear the name of the parcel or lieu-dit of origin.