Mark Haisma

Looking back, all Mark’s previous winemaking experiences, including his ten years at the highly regarded Yarra Yering in his native Australia, seemed to be leading him to his ultimate destiny, becoming a bona fide Burgundian vigneron. He made the bold move 17 years ago, in 2007, when he decided to infiltrate a local industry with hundreds of years of family history behind it.

He started with no vines of his own at all and had to quickly establish a network of contracts and informal arrangements to buy grapes. Thankfully, buying fruit was not nearly as expensive as it is today! Over time, he began to work many of the vineyards himself and his farming techniques would gradually improve the quality of the fruit which would be harvested on his behalf or, more and more often, by himself.

With climate change, picking dates have become even more crucial than they used to be and being able to manage the process is a huge boon to the evolution of his wines. But his great dream has always been to have vines of his own and, gradually, he managed to acquire various plots across the two Côtes.

Concurrently, he has constructed a custom-made new winery in Gilly-les-Citeaux, just across the RN74 from Vougeot and about a mile from Morey-Saint-Denis to the north and Vosne-Romanée to the south. This has given him more space and freedom to evolve his operation still further. He is always disappointed when he loses access to a vineyard, often because a member of the owner’s family has decided to take over the estate and makes wines of their own, but, generally, the strength of his relationships with such owners and the authenticity of his personality, has ensured that he has built up significant runs of vintages of various specific wines over the past decade and a half.

Mark is a fan of whole bunch, though he is not obsessive about it, and adapts to the style and quality of fruit he has in his winery. Perhaps surprisingly for an Australian, he is searching for subtlety, freshness, aromatics, and using a certain amount of whole-bunch allows him to be successful in his quest. Quality continues to climb as everything falls into place and it was fascinating to see how well his wines performed on their debut at the Burgfest retrospective in the autumn, when we revisited the 2019 vintage.