Jean-Marie Guffens is the Belgian who shook up the Maconnais. He founded Verget in 1990 in Sologny on a radical premise for the time: buy grapes, not finished wine, and vinify everything yourself in one cellar under one set of rules. Since 2016 the house has been run by Julien Desplans, an oenologist who earned his stripes at Chateau Palmer and Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. Les Chataigniers comes from limestone parcels in the upper reaches of Fuisse, aged six months in oak with a quarter of it new. It is the mineral, flinty side of the Maconnais rather than the plush side, and it is the reason people keep saying the Macon is Burgundy’s best value.