Chateau Closiot, C de Sec 2023

Meet the “crazy Belgian”, how his fellow Burgundian winemakers lovingly call him, who snuck into Burgundy and whispered to Chardonnay: “Let’s shake things up.” Jean-Marie Guffens and his wife Maine left Flanders in the mid 1970s, not to inherit estates or tick boxes but to learn, experiment and fall in love with the land. They planted their first vines in 1979 in steep, overlooked parcels of Maconnais, and never looked back.

Guffens is not your pompous grand cru architect. He’s the kind of winemaker who plants where no one else bothers, lets the soil breathe, and favours subtlety over show. He even coined a term for his approach: “non-cultivation.” In practice it means minimal intervention, organic instincts and letting each plot speak for itself.

He’s built two names in Burgundy: Domaine Guffens-Heynen, his personal lab in Maconnais, and Maison Verget, a matching-shoed negociant endeavour that widens his touch across the region. Whether it's white wines that balance tension with texture or elegant, mineral-driven expressions that feel transparent and honest, the goal is always the same- wine that breathes and talks to you.

But Guffens never was one to stay put. Drawn south-west to Bordeaux, he took over Chateau Closiot in Barsac. Here he applies the same restless energy, reimagining a region often locked in tradition. Sweet wines get redefined with freshness and lift, dry whites gain depth and verve, and everything carries his unmistakable signature of clarity and conviction.

For our Trinkfluss community, Guffens is a reminder that greatness doesn’t need ceremony. It can happen quietly with curiosity, conviction and a little poetic irreverence.