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I love the story behind a bottle of wine.

I quickly forget names, but I can visualize the taste of the wine with the story of the winemaker and the place…forever. The person and the taste are reminiscent of each other.

But with Michel Gahier, and this interesting bottle of organic Trousseau from the Jura region of France, we have only a faint fingerprint of information about the person and less details about the wine. The random photo above from a traveler in Arbois is all I could locate.

What do we know about Michel Gahier and his wine?

Not much. Folklore has it that he is the neighbor of the famous Pope of Arbois, Jacque’s Puffeney, in the small town of Montagney-les-Asures in the Jura region on the eastern border of France. Having an adjacent vineyard and the Pope’s tutelage, has obviously been enough to create a market for his wine and magically get it from the windy country roads of the Jura on the eastern border of central France…to my local wine shop in NYC.

I’m a big fan of Jacque’s Puffeney and his organic and almost perfect Trousseaus are weightless, elegant but remarkably full-bodied.

This bottle of ’07 Trousseau Grands Vergers from Michel Gahier, holds similar qualities to Puffeney’s Trousseaus, most likely from the hillside itself, but is unique. It is tangier, more full with berries and much firmer. Also a bit brighter, a bit more tightly wound and strongly mineral on the palate as it finishes.

Incredible really. As I’ve been looking for information on Gahier, I keep tasting this bottle and doing comparisons with Puffeney and Philippe Bornard and sharpening my palate. Maybe knowing a bit less about the person has sharpened my taste…if not my imagination 😉

At $28 a bottle, similar pricing to Puffeney, this is a must try for the Arbois aficionado if you can find it.

Available from Chambers Street Wines in TriBeCa, NYC.

Another huge thanks to Sophie Barrett, the Taste Princess of Jura (and buyer for Chambers Street Wines), for guiding me through this remote corner of France.