Daniel-Etienne Defaix's commitment to extraordinarily long aging, organic farming, and natural fermentations puts him well outside the region's mainstream, but his deeply expressive late-released wines are Chablis to their core. Defaix’s ancestors cultivated the vine in the sixteenth century at the Château de Faix near Avallon, not far from Chablis, making him the 14th generation to continue this long family tradition.

Today, the domaine consists of 28 hectares planted exclusively to Chardonnay. All the wines at this estate are vinified in a similar fashion. The grapes are pressed slowly for three hours, separated parcel by parcel, with only the finest juice maintained for bottling at the domaine. The wines normally ferment for three weeks using only indigenous yeast. The malolactic fermentation is always completed but never artificially rushed.

The wines rest on the fine lees in stainless steel tanks for at least 18 months without exposure to air and without the addition of sulfur. He is firmly in the “unoaked" camp of Chablis producers. Astonishingly, he bottles these cru-level wines only after eight to ten years of aging in tanks, therein undergoing a slow natural settling which prevents the need for filtration. In generations past, long aging in Chablis was more the rule than the exception, but today he is virtually alone in that practice. Daniel-Etienne Defaix releases his wine to the market only after obtaining several years of bottle age, at which point the market has the pleasure of having access to wines that more fully express the remarkable and unique terroir that is Chablis.