Domaine Pierre Fonjallaz - Vins Biodynamiques

Vines worked from the lake upward

In the terraces above Lake Geneva, Pierre Fonjallaz, winemaker at Domaine Pierre Fonjallaz - Vins Biodynamiques in Bourg En Lavaux, keeps biodynamics at the center of the estate. His post is the older Vaud double role, vigneron-encaveur, the grower who also carries the cellar. Since 2000 he has held that station in Cully, after leading the family estate across Epesses, Calamin, and Dézaley from 1992 to 2000. The move did not take him away from the family ground. It placed him deeper inside its production life, with the vineyard and cellar treated as one method rather than two trades.

The lineage here is practical. Fonjallaz worked in the family vineyards before taking the estate into biodynamic and organic farming, with Demeter certification attached to that choice. Lavaux gives him a severe apprenticeship of its own: steep stone terraces, lake light, and parcels where Chasselas reads small changes in soil and exposure without needing much cellar speech. The domaine remains a small family-run estate, and that scale matters. The hands can stay close to the vines.

A biodynamic method on 2.3 hectares

The estate farms 2.3 hectares across Epesses, Calamin, and Dézaley, three names that carry specific weight in Lavaux AOC. Chasselas is the white grape at the center of the work, with Pinot Noir and Gamay also part of the domaine’s range. The farming is biodynamic and organic, with synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers left out of the program. Compost, cover crops, and biodynamic preparations carry the soil work instead, joined by manual labor in the vineyard.

That manual discipline suits the terraces. Machines do not easily command these slopes, and the method depends on repeated passes rather than one large intervention. The cellar follows the same restraint. The wines are made from estate fruit, with cellar work directed toward the character of the parcels rather than a fixed house effect. Native yeast fermentation and measured élevage are part of the domaine’s stated direction, allowing Calamin, Dézaley, and Epesses to keep their own pressure in the glass. The house’s named bottlings include Calamin and Ortica.

The cellar without theatre

The tasting room here belongs to a working biodynamic domaine, not to a design performance. The cellar is quiet, low-key, and close to the practical business of wine: bottles, stone, the agricultural plainness of a family place that has more to say through Chasselas than through staging. Lavaux is never absent from the room. The lake sits below the terraces, and the vineyards rise behind the cellar in the old pattern of walls and narrow rows.

Inside that setting, the pace remains bench-side. A cellar tasting at Fonjallaz is built around the wines, not ceremony. The glass returns to the same questions the vineyard asks each season: how much lake moderation the fruit carried, how Calamin differs from Dézaley, how far a biodynamic method can let Chasselas speak without decoration.

Why the small scale matters

Lavaux has many family cellars, but few domaines work fully in biodynamics at this scale. Fonjallaz’s place in the region is earned through continuity rather than volume: the same family ground, the same terraced appellation, a production philosophy held since 2000. The next thing here is not an announced expansion. It is the ongoing work of Pierre Fonjallaz in Cully, bottle by bottle, through Calamin and Ortica.