Blaise Duboux

Seventeen generations on the slope

Chasselas sets the discipline before the cellar door opens. Blaise Duboux, winemaker at Blaise Duboux in Epesses, works it as the regional measure of the estate, the grape he has named as the one that matters here. He is also the owner and oenologist, so the same hands carry the choice from terrace to bottle. The Duboux family has farmed these Lavaux slopes for more than 500 years, and Blaise is identified as the 17th generation active on the estate. He took over from his father in 2010, keeping the house inside a line of custody rather than treating succession as a change of style. The brief he gives the cellar is spare: “I want the most natural wine possible.” That sentence is not decoration at this address. It sits behind the organic farming, the restraint in the range, and the insistence that Chasselas can say different things from Dézaley, Calamin, Epesses, and Villette when the maker lets each place keep its own edge.

Five hectares read through Chasselas

The estate farms about 5 hectares of steep terraced vineyard in Lavaux, with 75% planted to Chasselas. That proportion gives the cellar its grammar. The house names five Chasselas cuvées across two Dézaley wines, a Calamin, an Epesses, and a Villette, using the variety less as a house signature than as a way to separate cru, village, and slope. Organic conversion began in 2016, and certification has been in place since 2018 under bio-inspecta, CH-BIO-006. On these terraces, that choice carries labor in the body: narrow walls, hand attention, and an old agricultural architecture that does not bend easily to efficiency. The remaining plantings widen the register without moving the center. Chardonnay and Marsanne stand with the whites; Plant Robez, an old Gamay selection, joins Pinot Noir, Syrah, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Divico among the reds. Named bottles such as Cuvée Vincent, OCTO, Le Paon, Dézaley Grand Cru Corniche, and Plant Robez 2014 give the program internal markers, each one a different sentence in the estate vocabulary.

The cellar below the UNESCO terraces

The room keeps close to the village scale of Epesses: a cellar tasting space, the nearby vines, Lake Geneva below the terraces, and conversation moving between vineyard and glass. Lavaux has held UNESCO World Heritage status since 2007, but the landscape is not treated here as backdrop. It is the working surface. Visitors are brought through the vines around the estate and village, then back to the tasting room for current vintages, with Blaise described by the house as accompanying visits himself. The mood is quiet and interpretive, more bench-side than performance. The work asks the guest to read small separations: the difference between Calamin and Dézaley, between a village bottling and an old-vine expression, between a grape that can seem transparent and a cellar that refuses to make it blank.

A regional grape held in focus

The estate’s recent recognition has stayed close to the same center. VINUM named Blaise Duboux among its “Fabuleux Swiss Wine Estates” in 2025, and the house has also pointed to a 2024 Falstaff distinction for its Chasselas. Awards can travel faster than Lavaux wine often does, but the useful residue here is practical: more readers may come to the bottle through the same grape Blaise names first. The line to hold is his own, “The one that matters a lot to me is Chasselas; it is the one from this region.” At Blaise Duboux, that sentence lands in Dézaley Grand Cru Corniche.