Antoine Sunier

From Beaune to the Régnié cellar

The fruit arrives by hand before Antoine Sunier, winemaker at Antoine Sunier in Regnie Durette, takes it into the cellar as whole bunches. His work here began in 2014, after Beaune gave him the trade’s base vocabulary and after a change of life that moved him out of telecommunications and into the season’s demands. The turn was not dressed up as inheritance. It passed through work stages in 2012 at Domaine Lapalu in Beaujolais and Chateau de Prémeaux in Burgundy, where cellar rhythm and organic farming became daily practice rather than theory. Since then, Régnié-Durette has been the fixed point: a small domaine built around Gamay noir à jus blanc, organic vineyard work, and wines that keep their identity close to granite. Julien Sunier, his older brother, belongs to the family context of the region, but Antoine’s bench is his own. He works from Régnié as home ground, with Morgon close enough to test another register of the grape without leaving the domaine’s narrow orbit.

Whole bunches inside a small domaine

The method here starts outside the cellar. The vineyards total 5.5 hectares, with 4.3 hectares in Régnié AOC and 1.2 hectares in Morgon AOC, all within a 3km perimeter of the estate. The planting density is 10,000 plants per hectare, a figure that matters because the vines compete, the roots work, and the fruit carries that pressure into the vat. Sunier farms organically, with Alpes Contrôles certification, and uses straddle tillage, plant cover, inter-row grass strips, cereals, and peas as part of the vineyard discipline. The harvest is manual, with sorting in the vineyard before the fruit reaches the cellar. Fermentation follows the Beaujolais language of whole bunches and carbonic maceration, running 7 to 12 days depending on the cuvée, then continuing with indigenous yeasts. Aging moves between Burgundy barrels and epoxy vats, on fine lees, for 8 to 12 months without sulphite. The barrel share can run from 50% to 100%, using older Burgundy barrels that have already carried 10 to 12 wines.

Granite, alluvium, and a quiet cellar

The estate is not written around hospitality theatre. It is a working Beaujolais cellar and vineyard address, quiet by nature, with the tasting room secondary to the rows and the vats. Régnié brings deep granite; Morgon brings old alluvial soils. That difference gives the cellar two related pressures to read, both through Gamay, both through low-intervention practice. The place feels small because the work is small: hand-harvested fruit, vineyard sorting, whole clusters, old barrels, fine lees. Nothing here needs a broad stage. The craft sits in repeatable decisions, made close to the fruit and close to the village.

Three wines as a signature

Sunier’s named signatures are Gamay Poursuite, Morgon, and Régnié. Together, they keep the focus on the grape rather than a single house style, with Régnié as the home appellation and Morgon as the deeper counterpoint. The next measure of the domaine is the same one the cellar has used since 2014: how Antoine Sunier carries Gamay Poursuite, Morgon, and Régnié through the next vintage.