Collection: Domaine de l’Octavin – Alice Bouvot

Born in the Jura, Alice came back home at the age of 30, after studying in Bordeaux and Dijon, and working abroad, from Chile to the Napa Valley… That’s when she met her then-partner, with whom she founded back in 2005 the “Domaine de l’Octavin”, in Arbois. The couple rapidly decided to farm organically and obtained full Demeter certification in 2010 already.

From the few hectares they started with, more plots and vineyards came enriching the Domaine. Chardonnay, Savagnin, Pinot Noir, Trousseau and Poulsard… the whole spectrum of Jura grapes, famous for their freshness and great acidity, ideal to craft those natural wines so dear to Alice. A trained cello player, Alice compares wine to classical music and improvisation. Far from the technological wines you can learn at school, natural wines represent for her a certain form of improvisation, where the winegrower isn’t there to act but much rather to “guide” the grapes, following nature’s emotions.

After facing tough years of spring frost and having to deal with the resulting poor crops, Alice developed a line of “négoce” wines, with grapes coming from her friends’ vineyards in the Beaujolais, the South of France or the neighbouring Bugey. The wines, with their now famously funny garden dwarfs, prove once again Alice’s talent and her unmistakable touch, while pushing further the limits of her native Jura…