Olivier Merlin
Olivier Merlin is widely recognized as one of the very finest winemakers in the Mâconnais, and has received numerous rewards for his breathtakingly beautiful, minerally-infused and racy Mâcons. These are wines that simply tower above ninety-nine percent of all producers of Mâcon-Villages wines, with a depth, complexity and structural integrity that have much more in common with more illustrious neighbors in the Côte de Beaune. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the region, Monsieur Merlin actually cut his teeth working for a few years in California, before returning to France in 1987. The domaine as it is now constituted was started in that year when Monsieur Merlin rented vines from the retiring owner of Vieux Saint Sorlin; eventually he has come to purchase all of these holdings in the villages of La Roche-Vineuses and Viré-Clessé. He additionally added to his Mâcon-Villages holdings by buying parcels of vines in St. Véran in both 1994 and 1996. As good vineyard land was unavailable in Pouilly-Fuissé, either to buy or rent, Monsieur Merlin acquired a négociant license in 1997 in order to be able to round out his portfolio of white wines with a bit of Pouilly-Fuissé.

The winemaking for the white wines here is very classy, as the wines are barrel aged for just under a year with a very small percentage of new oak used. Across the board they offer up compelling blends of crisp, focused apple and pear fruit, a bit of lime zest, and fine bases of stony minerality. The two Mâcon bottlings are beautifully structured out of the blocks every year, and offer up a fine combination of bright and fresh early accessibility and the capability to age and improve in the bottle over several years. There are very few examples of Mâcon that are in the same stunning league as those of Monsieur Merlin. The St. Véran bottling sees a tad more new oak than the Mâcon bottlings (though still a very modest underpinning), and it too shares a brilliant transparency down to the minerally base of soil. It is consistently one of the best examples of St. Véran to be found. The Pouilly-Fuissé bottlings (there are three, a straight Pouilly-Fuissé, Pouilly-Fuissé "Terroir de Fuisse" - a blend of young and old vines, and a Pouilly-Fuissé “Clos des Quarts” single vineyard cuvée) are bigger, slightly oakier wines that offer up the depth and palate impression of wines from the Côte de Beaune. They too share a lovely base of soil nuance with the other Merlin wines in the lineup, though the richer fruit and the touch more oaky profiles of both tend to ultimately make for more fruit-driven wines.

A few years after starting up, Monsieur Merlin decided to augment his fine portfolio of white wines from the Mâconnais with a bit of red wine production, and he subsequently added a Bourgogne rouge bottling. He had a bit of gamay planted when he first began working with the Vieux St. Sorlin vineyards, from which he made a good solid Mâcon rouge, but this hardly contented Monsieur Merlin. After several years of releasing his age worthy Bourgogne rouge, a cellar expansion in the mid-1990s allowed for a bit more red wine production, and Olivier set his sights on some of the best cru vineyards in Beaujolais. He now makes a pair of cru Beaujolais cuvées, which are a Fleurie and a Moulin-à-Vent, with the possibility that if the right parcel of old vines comes along, it would take little convincing for him to expand here. Both his cru Beaujolais bottlings are excellent, and as one long-time importer who has been with the domaine since Monsieur Merlin’s arrival in ’87 commented recently: “As brilliant as his white wines have consistently been over the years, he may well be an even better red winemaker!” All the wines of Olivier Merlin and Domaine de Vieux St. Sorlin are textbook examples of their appellations, and amongst the most exciting wines today emerging from the Mâconnais and Beaujolais.