The Caviste, the Frost & the Letter K

Karnage is a story of Jura friendship between two connoisseurs — but each half of the friendship matters. Stéphane Planche spent more than two decades as a sommelier, including at the celebrated Maison Jeunet in Arbois, before opening Les Jardins de St-Vincent in 2002 — a caviste's shop specialising in wines without additives, decades before that was fashionable. Over twenty years behind the counter and in the cellar, Stéphane tasted everything, knew everyone, and built what visitors describe as a magnificent cellar of treasures. He dabbled in winemaking more than once: first in collaboration with Alice Bouvot of Domaine de l'Octavin, then with Jean-Marc Brignot and Sébastien Morin — the informal "Projet BAKA" experiments — and finally with Charles Dagand.

Charles Dagand is the other pillar: co-founder with Alice Bouvot of Domaine de l'Octavin in 2005, one of the estates that defined Jura natural wine for a generation. But farming the Jura also taught him its cruelty — entire harvests lost to disease and frost, years of work erased by a single April night. The négoce model offered an answer: if you source certified organic grapes from a network of trusted growers across several regions, no single frost can take everything. The quality was guaranteed by two decades of relationships — recommendations flowing from friends like Anthony Tortul of La Sorga, ensuring only the best fruit made the trip north.

In 2020, the two made it official: Karnage, a pure négoce based on purchases of certified grapes, vinified in Charles's cellar in Abergement-le-Grand. The first releases — detailed wines positively brimming with energy — arrived at a handful of the world's best natural wine merchants in 2021 and sold through immediately. Then, in 2023, the story turned again: Charles stepped back from winemaking in the Jura, and Stéphane took the helm alone — the 2023 vintage marking the last wines made by the pair together. Karnage continues as a one-man project, animated by the same single idea it started with: wines Stéphane himself wants to drink.

The Karnage rulebook fits in one sentence, and the estate states it without hesitation: certified grapes, vinified with their natural yeasts, without any additives — sulfur being an additive — and without anything removed. No filtration. Pur jus de raisins. Pure grape juice. No cultured yeasts, no enzymes, no acid corrections, no fining, no filtering, and not a milligram of sulfur at any stage — from the day the fruit arrives to the day the bottle leaves Abergement-le-Grand.

Within that absolute frame, the style is defined by touch rather than dogma. Stéphane favours light, infusion-style macerations — the grapes steeped gently rather than extracted hard — finding for each variety the harmony between perfumed aromatics, vibrant fruit and subtle tannins. Whole bunches and destemmed fruit are combined across tanks; juice from direct-pressed grapes is poured over the rest, a semi-carbonic approach that keeps the wines lifted and perfumed; macerations run short — seven days, fifteen days, three weeks depending on the cuvée. Fermentations, including malolactic, are allowed to run their natural course — the 2020 Zak, a Mauzac from Limoux, fermented slowly through the entire winter before bottling the following July.

What makes the wines distinctive is the palate behind them: decades spent in the company of winemakers across the world, thousands of benchmark bottles opened at the shop and the restaurant table. Stéphane works by intuition after harvesting — tasting, deciding, adjusting the maceration to what the fruit of that year, from that grower, actually is. The cuvées change with the sourcing; the names always carry a K — Karnage's typographic signature, down to the last detail — and the labels carry the artwork of Tony Pessoa, a close friend, giving the bottles a visual flair as untamed as what's inside. The results are detailed wines positively brimming with energy — pure, vibrant, endlessly characterful, and begging to be drunk.

Karnage is not merely a négoce; it is the bottled sum of two careers spent inside natural wine's inner circle — a sommelier-caviste who stocked the world's most additive-free cellar in Arbois, and a grower who co-founded one of the Jura's defining estates and lost harvests enough to know the value of a wider net. In an era when natural négoce has become a crowded field, Karnage stands apart through provenance and precision: certified organic fruit from an honour roll of growers, vinified with the infusion lightness and zero-zero discipline of people who have tasted everything and settled on nothing added. From the BAKA experiments to the first 2020 releases that sold through in cases, the project proved that the Jura's natural wine culture could extend across all of France without losing its accent.

The legacy of Karnage is the legacy of the caviste's palate turned winemaker. Stéphane Planche is not a vigneron who learned to sell; he is a seller who learned, over twenty-plus years, exactly what makes a wine worth drinking — and then made only that. He does not chase appellation. He does not chase consistency of range: the cuvées shift with the sourcing, the K-names and Tony Pessoa's artwork marking each new constellation of regions and varieties. He makes wines of infusion and intuition — Kari, Zak, Kolombour, Kassette B, Chark and their successors — each one native-yeasted, unsulfured, unfiltered, and built to give pleasure now. The absence of vineyards is not a gap; it is the freedom to follow the best fruit in France, wherever friends grow it.

The future of the project is tied to the future of Stéphane's address book and his cellar in Abergement-le-Grand — to the growers of Le Mazel, Alsace and Roussillon, to the new names each vintage adds, and to the drinkers in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Sydney and Tokyo who wait for the small allocations. Charles's departure in 2023 closed the founding chapter; the project continues leaner and more personal, one man's standard applied to France's best organic fruit. As each new vintage redraws the sourcing map, as the infusion touch keeps the wines lifted and perfumed, and as Les Jardins de St-Vincent remains the essential Arbois pilgrimage, Karnage remains what it was founded to be: a friendship's answer to the frost — a négoce that trusted the growers, the yeasts, and nothing else, and made pur jus a style in itself. The K is small. The conviction is not.