Glassware

Before a single drop reaches the glass, the bottle itself already plays a role in the Jura. Vin Jaune is bottled exclusively in the Clavelin, a squat 62-centiliter bottle designed by glassmakers near Dole in the eighteenth century for the Clavelin family. Its shape is no accident. Of a liter of wine that ages for six years and three months in barrel without topping up, around 38 percent evaporates. What remains is exactly 62 centiliters, the angels' share.

Vin Jaune is nonetheless drunk from a perfectly ordinary glass, the so-called Verre INAO, a narrow tulip shape holding around 210 milliliters. Its tight opening, barely 46 millimeters wide, traps the wine's heavy, complex aromas in the glass instead of letting them dissipate immediately. That's exactly what a wine needs when its aroma compound, sotolon, releases notes of walnut and curry only slowly.

Different rules apply to Poulsard. Here, the glass should do as little as possible. Its pale, almost translucent color, the famous oeil de perdrix, calls for clear, colorless crystal without cuts, or the wine loses exactly what defines it before you've even had a chance to smell it.

And because a Vin Jaune has so much to say, it needs very little volume. A small sip is enough. That way you spend minutes with the same aroma as it evolves in the glass. Filling the glass to the brim, as no one would mind with a simple country wine, takes something away from Vin Jaune: exactly the space where all of this happens.