From Cork To Screwcap: Laroche’s Chablis Reinvention

When one of France’s most famous producers, Michel Laroche, of Domaine Laroche in Chablis uncorked 90 bottles of his award-winning Grand Cru Blanchot at a tasting in New York more than two decades ago, he expected to showcase the pinnacle of Chablis winemaking. What he didn’t expect was sabotage—by cork.

Each bottle told a different story. Some were brilliant. Others were corked, flawed, or simply lifeless. “He opened all 90 bottles,” recalls his daughter, Margaux Laroche, when hosting a trade lunch in Hong Kong with importer Links Concept. “And the 90 bottles were different because of the cork quality.”

The 1990s marked the peak of Burgundy’s closure problems, Margaux says, with wines plagued by both TCA cork taint and Premox—premature oxidation in white Burgundy.

“You do your best in the vineyards, in the winery, then you bottle the wine, put in a cork—and you gamble with what’s going to happen,” says Margaux.

“You do your best in the vineyards, in the winery, then you bottle the wine, put in a cork—and you gamble with what’s going to happen,” says Margaux.

That moment marked the beginning of one of Burgundy’s most controversial winemaking choices: replacing cork with screwcap—not on entry-level bottles, but on Grand Cru wines. In a region where cork isn’t just tradition but identity, it was a defiant move.

“Putting a screwcap on Burgundy wine?” Margaux says. “That was the worst thing you could do.”

More than 10 years after putting Domaine Laroche wines under screwcap, the family carried the practice to their new venture in 2012. After Margaux’s father sold the Domaine Laroche in 2009, they launched their new family estate, Le Domaine d’Henri, in 2012 —they did it with a twist: every bottle sealed under screwcap.

The backlash in France was immediate.

“We couldn’t sell a single bottle here,” Margaux recalls. “French consumers saw it as cheap. We had to rethink.”

Eventually, they offered both screwcap and DIAM, a high-tech cork alternative engineered to eliminate cork taint. “Now the technology in cork just got so much better,” says Margaux.

The decision wasn’t about marketing—it was about preservation. In Burgundy, where climatic extremes are wreaking havoc on vintages, consistency in the cellar has become as critical as adaptation in the vineyard.

“We work so hard to produce these wines,” Margaux says. “We don’t want to gamble at the very end.”

That meticulous control now extends from the vineyard to the bottle. The family uses both organic and biodynamic methods today, one of the few in the traditional Chablis region, where less than 10% of the wineries are organic, due to high humidity in spring. 

They also experiment with amphorae, stainless steel, and Austrian oak for ageing, and avoid fining to maintain maximum concentration and purity in the glass.

At the Hong Kong trade lunch, guests sampled current releases alongside rare back vintages, including the estate’s inaugural 2012 vintage of its highly reviewed Premier Cru Fourchaume and Fourchaume Vieilles Vignes.

CLIMATE CHANGE

While closure and ageing may be a matter of choice, climate change is not. And as Burgundy’s once-predictable climate lurches from drought to frost, vintage variation has become dizzying.

“In 2021, we lost 70% of our crop to spring frost,” Margaux says.  Because the primary buds were destroyed, they had to wait for second-generation buds to develop, pushing harvest into late September. “In 2023, one of the biggest crops,” she added. That year harvest began early, with yields four times higher than 2021. “We had nearly 60 hectolitres per hectare in 2023, vs 15 hectolitres per hectare in 2021,” she said.

The wines from those years couldn’t be more different. The Le Domaine d’Henri Chablis Premier Cru Fourchaume 2021 is lean, citrusy, and austere, while its Chablis Saint Pierre 2023 is ripe, plush, and generous. “It’s the opposite side of vintages,” she says.

The extremes have made adaptability their core philosophy, due to the unpredictability of climate change.

“Before 2010, we had one bad year—by that I mean frost or hail—maybe once every ten years. Now in Chablis, it’s one every three. Every three years, we lose more than half of our crop, mostly due to hail or frost or mildew.”

More and more producers in Chablis are employing new frost-fighting systems—electric heating cables, wind towers, candles and old-school sprinklers. “I think people have started investing more and more because when losses happen every three years, it makes more sense to invest in protection than rely on insurance,” she says. “Insurance is fine when it’s once every ten years—but when it’s every three, you want to produce wine, because once it’s lost, it’s lost.”