“I don’t want to be a Burgundy guy like all of them.”
That is close to the first thing Numa Cornut will tell you, and he comes by it honestly. He raced motocross as a boy, and where the other riders all took the same line through the track, he went off it to find his own. His family has made wine for nine generations at Château Guiot, in the southern Rhône. He could have stayed. Instead, just like in his motocross days, he looked for his own path. He started a domaine in Burgundy, a region where he inherited not a single row of vines. Where his twin brother Alexis decided to stay and work on the family estate, Numa decided he wanted to see more first.
From the southern Rhône to Burgundy
“I was born in a tank, I was born in nature,” he says, and he means it almost literally — Guiot runs to a hundred hectares, the nearest neighbor a kilometer off. His father, a precise and technical winemaker, taught him to watch: a vineyard is always giving you signals, and the work is to keep looking for them. But his father taught him the limit of that, too. There was a song he loved, by the French actor and singer Jean Gabin — “Je sais, on ne sait jamais,” I know, you never know. Numa and his twin brother Alexis later made a cuvée in his honor. “You work with the sun, with the earth, with everything,” Numa says. “We are just an option. We cannot control everything.”
Learning the rest meant leaving. Before Burgundy, he spent years following harvests across France and abroad, and ended up in Margaret River, Australia, where his four-month stay turned into two years. He found himself working at a winery where they put him in charge of the white wines — a turn for someone whose family made almost nothing but red. “It opened my mind,” he says, “because in France, especially in the big regions like Bordeaux or Burgundy, it can be very conservative, very old school.” He still returns to Australia most years. It is where his work with white wine came into focus, and where he learned to hold curiosity and humility at the same time.
A domaine across the Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits
In Burgundy, he finally decided to stop moving. “You can spend an entire lifetime trying to understand just a few hectares,” he says. That depth is what he wanted. He settled at the end of 2020 and began assembling his domaine parcel by parcel, starting in Volnay and spreading across the Côte d’Or — today around 4.5 hectares spanning the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits, village level up to grand cru.
How Numa Cornut makes wine
Eighty percent is made in the vineyard
His winemaking starts long before the cellar. “I like to say eighty percent of the wine is made in the vineyard,” he says. And in Burgundy, no vineyard is quite like its neighbor. “It’s the only place in the world where you find a mosaic of terroir like this.” An appellation like Meursault is barely 400 hectares, yet a parcel at one end tastes nothing like a parcel five minutes away. A place like that can’t be farmed to a formula.
He watches the fruit and the weather, and lets what he sees decide when to harvest. In Burgundy, he is often among the earliest growers to start picking, because in a warm year, the heat can kill your acidity in as little as two days, and acidity is what he is protecting. In the cellar, he keeps new oak low and his hand light. The wine, he believes, will tell you what it needs if you are paying attention.
Reading the vintage
He talks about vintages like the farmer he is. A warm, generous year like 2023 carries its own demands; a frost-cut year like 2024 carries others. The work is to adapt to what the season gives. “I take what nature wants to give me,” he says. Some parcels resist him no matter the year, often the ones he expected the most from, and he has learned to listen to a site rather than impose a shape on it.
Sustainable farming, honestly stated
On farming, he is direct, which is rarer than it should be. He farms sustainably and works as cleanly as the vineyard allows, and he will not dress it up. “I’m organic in my heart, in my practice every day,” he says. “But I prefer to be humble and right. I don’t want to do greenwashing.” It is an honest position from someone who grew up understanding exactly how much of a vineyard a label can and cannot promise.
The wines in the glass
You can taste all of it in the glass. “I like tension, I like minerality,” he says. “I don’t like too much wood. I like more of the wine itself.” The wines are recognizably Burgundian in structure — the reds elegant and fresh, the whites cut with mineral drive — but the clarity and restraint are his own, sharpened by the years away. He learned the classical way and then went looking for the rest.
Why he chose JP Bourgeois
That same instinct shaped his choice of American importer. A friend in Florida who had known his family for decades made the introduction to JP Bourgeois, and what Numa recognized in the portfolio was a group of real growers and genuine stories rather than a catalog. “I don’t want to be a number in a big portfolio,” he says. “I prefer to be a person.” It is the same scale at which he farms.
His ambition is modest in the way the most serious people often are. “Some people drink more label than winemaker,” he says. “For me, success is if they understand what I do.”
The full range — village through grand cru, across both côtes — is in the JP Bourgeois portfolio now. The individual wines, with tasting notes and details, are below.
