Maximilien, Emilien and the Cellar in Juliénas — a Wine Made by Three Hands

The concept of authorship in wine has always been contested. Who makes the wine? The vine, which produces the fruit? The winemaker, who transforms that fruit into something fermented and aged? The terroir, which imposes its character on everything that grows in it? Or the person who decides, before any of these processes begin, what kind of wine should result?

At Maison Bugnazet, we have developed a language for this question. We call it the wine made by three hands: the hand of the vine, the hand of the cellar, and the hand of the publisher. The answer to "who made this wine" is never one name.

The Publisher

Maximilien Haïbi holds the title of editorial director at Maison Bugnazet, a job description borrowed deliberately from the publishing world. The parallel is exact. An editorial director at a literary press does not write the books; they identify what books should exist, guide the author's choices, and make decisions about what the final work should be before, during, and after its creation. The manuscript that arrives on a publisher's desk becomes something different — more precise, more intentional — by the time it reaches the reader.

This is Maximilien's role in the wine. He identifies the terroirs worth working with, establishes the stylistic intention for each cuvée, and maintains the editorial consistency that makes a Bugnazet wine recognisable across appellations. He tastes at every stage of the process and brings back to the cellar not technical corrections but something harder to name: a sense of whether the wine is telling the right story.

This requires a particular combination of sensory acuity and conceptual clarity. It is not enough to know that a wine tastes good; you need to know what it should taste like, and you need to be able to communicate that in terms a winemaker can act on. The language between Maximilien and Emilien has developed over years of working together. It is partly technical, partly sensory, partly philosophical, and partly private.

The Winemaker

Emilien works the vineyards and the cellar. His responsibility is the translation of terroir into wine — not an arbitrary translation, but a guided one, shaped by the editorial intentions Maximilien brings to the process. This is a less comfortable position than it might appear. A winemaker who answers only to the vine and their own judgment has a kind of freedom that Emilien's role does not permit. But the constraint produces something valuable: alignment between what the wine is and what it is intended to be.

Emilien's approach to viticulture is observational first. He reads the vineyard rather than managing it according to a predetermined system. Soil health, vine vigour, water stress, the progress of véraison — each of these is assessed directly, season by season, parcel by parcel. The interventions that follow are proportional to what the vineyard actually needs rather than what a calendar prescribes.

In the cellar, his decisions reflect a similar philosophy: minimal intervention, but not negligible intervention. The distinction matters. Minimalist winemaking is not passive winemaking. It requires constant attention precisely because the margin for error narrows when you choose not to correct with technology. Emilien's fermentations are monitored closely. The decision to press, to rack, to begin ageing is made by observation rather than schedule. The wine tells him when it is ready to move.

The Cellar in Juliénas

Juliénas is one of the ten Beaujolais crus, known for wines of red fruit and spice. The village has retained the scale and character of the traditional Beaujolais winemaking community. The cellar Emilien works in sits in the village, a stone building of the kind that has housed Beaujolais wine for centuries: thick walls that regulate temperature without mechanical assistance, ancient wood beams overhead, the persistent smell of fermentation and old oak that no amount of cleaning ever entirely removes.

That smell is information. A cellar with the right microbial environment — native yeasts, established bacterial populations — contributes to fermentation in ways that a purpose-built industrial facility cannot replicate. The Juliénas cellar carries decades of production in its stone walls, and that continuity is part of what makes the wines made there taste like they come from somewhere specific.

The choice to work from Juliénas rather than from a larger, more strategically positioned facility was deliberate. Proximity to the cru vineyards — Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, and Morgon are all within a short distance — means the fruit arrives at the cellar in the condition it left the vineyard. Transport time and temperature exposure during harvest are minimised. The vine-to-vat chain is as short as the geography allows.

How Decisions Get Made

The most revealing conversations between Maximilien and Emilien happen during barrel tastings in winter, when the wines are still becoming what they will be. These are not formal tasting panels. They happen standing in the cellar, in the cold, with a thief and a glass, returning to the same barrel multiple times over weeks and months.

What Maximilien brings to these tastings is not technical expertise in the conventional sense — though years of dedicated tasting have produced a genuinely precise sensory acuity. What he brings is the editorial question: is this wine becoming what we intended it to be? Not is it correct, but is it right.

Emilien brings the opposite — a technical certainty about where the wine is in its development, combined with a genuine interest in Maximilien's response. He is not looking for validation. He is looking for information that his technical training does not provide: whether the wine's character is legible, whether it communicates something worth communicating, whether the person who opens it in two years will understand what was intended.

This back-and-forth produces decisions that neither person would make alone. The decision to extend maceration on a Morgon, to reduce the proportion of whole clusters in a particular Fleurie vintage, to bottle earlier than planned to preserve a freshness that will not return — these emerge from dialogue rather than individual judgment.

The Third Hand

The third hand — the vine itself — is the element neither person controls. It is a particular growing season, a late spring frost, an August heat wave, a harvest that arrives two weeks ahead of schedule. The vine's contribution is not a constraint on the wine; it is the wine's foundational material, the reality that every other decision must engage with.

At Maison Bugnazet, we do not use the language of "expressing the terroir" as if the terroir were a fixed text waiting to be read accurately. Terroir is different every year. The editorial response to it must be different every year. What stays constant is not the result but the intention: to make wines that are honest about where they come from, that carry the character of their place and their season without disguising either.

The three hands work together because wine is too complex to be made by fewer. The vine cannot edit itself. The cellar cannot see beyond the barrel. The publisher cannot build without material. The wine that results belongs equally to all three.

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