While its Savagnin dazzles New Yorkers, Domaine Ganevat’s assets are being seized by French authorities.
Last week, a unique vertical tasting of Les Vignes de Mon Père, Domaine Ganevat’s most sought-after cuvée, took place in New York. All 10 released vintages were tasted over a meal for a group of die-hard Jura wine lovers, hosted by Master Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier at Chambers Restaurant.
Not even winemaker Jean-François Ganevat had tasted the entire range at once, and Lepeltier has written movingly about the experience of tasting these wines, which currently command some of the highest prices in the Jura, according to Wine-Searcher data.
The timing of the tasting seems particularly poignant, coinciding as it does with a story originally broken by Le Monde in Paris last week, and picked up by the local press in eastern France, revealing that the assets of Domaine Ganevat were seized by the French courts in June of this year.
The seizure was confirmed by the Paris prosecutor as part of a preliminary investigation into money laundering by the former owner, Alexander Pumpyanskiy, son of Russian oligarch Dmitry Pumpyanskiy.
The story began in 2020, when rumors circulated that Jean-François Ganevat was planning to sell the prized 13-hectare family estate he had run since 1998, and that the buyer was believed to be Russian.
The rumors became reality in September 2021 with the confirmation of the sale to Pumpyanskiy, a client and friend of Ganevat. As reported in Wine-Searcher, according to interviews with both parties, Ganevat himself and his sister Anne were to remain closely involved in the management of the estate on behalf of the wine-loving Pumpyanskiy.
Less than six months later, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a kind of rapid buyback of the estate seemed to be taking place, in collaboration with Benoît Pontenier, General Manager of Prieuré St-Jean de Bébian, the Languedoc estate owned by the Pumpyanskiy family since 2008. A few days later, the Pumpyanskiy assets were frozen.
In this case, it took until March of this year for the new ownership to be finalized, with Pontenier buying both estates, with a small share also taken by Jocelyn Brancard, Ganevat’s oenologist since 2021. Neither Jean-François Ganevat nor his sister Anne were involved in the financial transactions.
French wine publication La Revue du Vin de France (RVF) reported late last year that there was “astonishment” among other vignerons that the €15 million price tag for the estates could be financed by two employees of the estates.
From the beginning of the crisis in March 2022, suspicions arose that the Pumpyanskiy family had somehow found a dubious way to ensure the financial survival of the two estates. RVF journalists discovered that large sums of money had been transferred to companies chaired by Pontenier, and that these may have come from a Cypriot fund holding company originally owned by the Pumpyanskiy family.
Meanwhile, Jean-François Ganevat told the local reporter for Le Progrès last week that he was simply concentrating on the vinification of the very good 2023 harvest and claimed that Pontenier had never discussed financial matters with him.
Recent appeals by Dmitry Pumpyanskiy to have him and his family removed from the EU sanctions list have been rejected. However, the French justice system is at least allowing work on the estates to continue as normal until the investigation is complete.
