The Australian in Gevrey: the wines of Mark Haisma

There are two ways to become a Burgundy producer. One is to be born into it, and inherit rows your great-grandfather planted. The other is to arrive from twelve thousand miles away with no land, no name and no family cellar, and persuade growers to sell you their fruit. Mark Haisma took the second route, and it has made him one of the more interesting addresses in the Côte.

He is Australian, and he spent a decade as winemaker at Yarra Yering in Victoria, alongside the late Dr Bailey Carrodus — a famously uncompromising figure, and the man who gave Haisma his lasting attachment to Shiraz. That detail matters later.

In 2007 he came to Burgundy. Vineyard land in the Côte d'Or had long since passed beyond the reach of anyone arriving without capital, so he did not buy any. He became a micro-négociant: buying grapes from growers, vintage by vintage, and making the wine himself. He rents cellar space in Gevrey-Chambertin, in Pierre Naigeon's cellar, and works at a scale that would embarrass most estates — in some years a single cuvée amounts to a handful of barrels.

Buying fruit is not the easy option

It is worth being clear about what this model asks of a winemaker. A domaine that owns its vines controls the farming and can improve the fruit over decades. A négociant controls neither, and must instead build relationships good enough that growers hand over their best parcels rather than their leftovers — in a region where those relationships are usually measured in generations, not years.

Haisma has done it across an unusually wide spread: Gevrey-Chambertin and Nuits-Saint-Georges, Morey-Saint-Denis and Bonnes-Mares, Volnay and Pommard, down to Saint-Romain and straight Bourgogne. He has since bought two hectares of his own in Gevrey and planted a further two in the Mâconnais, but the buying continues. He also makes a Cornas, from the northern Rhône, with the same grower he started with in 2007 — and has helped launch a winery, Dagon Clan, in Romania.

In the cellar the hand is light rather than absent. Whole bunches are used selectively — around 40% on the Gevrey — with some new wood, and the wines are built on perfume and tension rather than extraction.

The Shiraz experiment

The Carrodus inheritance finally surfaced in the Mâconnais. In 2016 Haisma planted three-tenths of a hectare intending to put in Chardonnay, and planted Shiraz instead. His explanation, given to Decanter, is hard to improve on:

He had already been making one from bought barrels since 2009, and vinifying it himself since 2010. The first vintage from his own Mâconnais vines was 2022, with 10% Gamay in the blend; from 2023 it is straight Shiraz. The open question, as he puts it, is whether Shiraz can be ripened consistently this far north — which, in a warming Burgundy, is a less eccentric proposition each year.

The wine we hold

One cuvée, and a good one to meet him through: Volnay's Fremiets sits on the Pommard side of the commune, and gives a wine with more frame than Volnay's reputation for delicacy would suggest — elegance with a spine.

More of the range reaches us in small quantities as vintages allow. See what is currently in the Cabinet, or speak to your concierge to be told when the next allocation lands.

Biographical detail drawn from Decanter's interview with Mark Haisma and from Wine Anorak. Prices shown TTC (VAT included) and correct at time of writing; check each wine's page for the current vintage and price.