Le Ratapoil 2020 | Ratapoil | Jura

Ratapoil is the project of Raphaël Monnier, a history and geography teacher from the Haut-Doubs who founded his domaine in 2009 while balancing teaching and viticulture until he left the classroom for good around 2019. The name carries two overlapping meanings. In the local Arbois vernacular, a ratapoil is an amateur or hobbyist winemaker — the self-deprecating label Raphaël adopted when he saw himself as an enthusiast coming from outside the trade. And for any historian, Ratapoil is the character created by the caricaturist Honoré Daumier for the satirical journal Le Charivari during the Second Republic: a gaunt, battered colonel with a lead-weighted cane, drawn as a weapon against Bonapartist propaganda. Both readings say something about the sensibility of whoever chose that name.

The estate is roughly 5 hectares spread across 18 to 20 parcels in 8 communes around Arbois, with the cellar in Arc-et-Senans. The most striking feature is that production is 70% red — the inverse of the Jura norm. Varieties are Jura's own — Poulsard, Trousseau, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Savagnin — plus a collection of near-extinct ancient varieties that Raphaël preserves in the co-planted Buffard parcel in the Doubs: Gueuche, Petit Béclan, Mézy, Enfariné, Seyvillard, Rayon d'Or and others, with vines over 60 years old. Soils range from the blue marl and Kimmeridgian limestone of the Arbois parcels to the limestone outcrops of the Doubs. The estate has been certified organic (Ecocert) since its founding, and the cellar approach is one of zero intervention: indigenous yeasts, semi-carbonic maceration for the reds, old neutral barrels and clay amphora for ageing, no fining, no filtration, and no added sulfur.