Domaine Croix-Duplex

A handover learned in the cellar

The handover came through daily cellar work before Maude Vogel, winemaker at Domaine Croix-Duplex in Grandvaux, officially took over in 2023. She had already spent a few years working alongside her brother, close enough to the rhythms of the place for succession to mean more than a family name on a label. At this estate below Grandvaux station, the work carries the memory of Samuel Vogel, who arrived from German-speaking Switzerland in 1929, built his home and cellar on the Lavaux hillside, and taught himself through viticulture and oenology books while making wine from the slopes around him.

Jean Vogel and Marlyse followed in 1973, then bought the family’s first vineyard in Epesses in 1975. That move began the expansion from small cellar to medium-sized family domaine, and it left the next generation with a broad map to tend. Maude now works as the third generation of the Vogel family, with decisions in the vineyard and cellar passing through her hands. She has spoken plainly about the pressure of inheriting work already carried to a high standard, and also about the release of finally having the right to decide freely in both vineyard and cellar. At Domaine Croix-Duplex, that freedom sits inside continuity rather than against it.

Thirty hectares across Vaud

The estate farms about 30 hectares spread across several Vaud wine-growing regions, a scale that gives the cellar breadth without making it anonymous. Lavaux remains the center of gravity, but the appellation names move across the portfolio: Villette, Epesses, Calamin, St-Saphorin, Bonvillars, Ollon, Yvorne. Chasselas leads the register, especially where Calamin gives the grape its Grand Cru frame, yet the cellar also works with Pinot Noir, Gamaret, Merlot, Syrah and Gewürztraminer. The tasting range reaches 31 wines and 14 grape varieties, enough to show how one family estate can read multiple parcels without losing its own accent.

The method published by the house is less about technical display than about place, vineyard and family continuity. Specific fermentation and ageing protocols are not stated by the domaine, so the craft here is better read through the visible structure: many parcels, many appellations, one cellar responsible for carrying them into still white, still red, rosé and sparkling wines. Maude’s named signatures, Calamin Grand Cru and Epesses Domaine Croix Duplex blanc, belong to that discipline. They keep the focus on Chasselas, slope, exposition and the old Lavaux habit of letting small differences in site do the speaking.

The terrace above Lake Geneva

The cellar sits on the hillside in the Lavaux UNESCO World Heritage region, with the station above it and the terraced vines falling away toward Lake Geneva. In winter, the room gathers around a fireplace, a practical warmth rather than décor. In clear weather, the veranda and large terraces pull the tasting outward. The view takes in the lake, the Alps and the vineyard walls, but the bench of the work remains close: glasses lined at the counter, bottles opened from a range that stretches across Vaud, Chasselas returning in different forms.

The atmosphere is conversational, family-run and unforced. The panorama could easily take over, yet the place works because the wine keeps calling the eye back from the horizon to the glass. A tasting here is not a survey of scenery; it is a way of reading the estate’s parcels from Grandvaux, Epesses, Calamin and the wider Vaud map while the cellar keeps its own pace.

Continuity with room to decide

What matters at Domaine Croix-Duplex is the way succession has stayed practical. The estate began with Samuel Vogel’s self-taught cellar in 1929, widened under Jean and Marlyse from 1973, and now sits under Maude Vogel’s judgment from 2023 onward. The next measure is not a public gesture, but the steady authorship of releases made under her name, beginning with the family’s Lavaux Chasselas and the Calamin Grand Cru.