Remarks

On Clos Joliette Bottles & Releases

JR Tipton·

A short, practical guide to identifying, buying, and cataloging the bottles of one of France's most enigmatic estates

Clos Joliette is a single hectare and a half of Petit Manseng on a south-facing amphitheater in Jurançon, planted in 1929. For nearly a century, fewer than two hundred cases per year were produced, and almost none were sold publicly. Old bottles surface at auction at three- and four-figure prices, accompanied by very little verifiable information about what is actually inside them.

This is a short, practical guide for collectors trying to make sense of a Joliette bottle they own, are about to buy. The history is sketched in only as much as is needed to understand the bottles themselves, with plenty of references for fruther reading.

Joliette in a nutshell

  • 1929–1989 — The Migné family plants and farms the estate. Production tiny, sold informally to friends and a handful of restaurants. Bertrand de Lur Saluces, the Yquem proprietor, declared Joliette the only Jurançon that could rival his own.1
  • 1989/1990 – 2015 — Michel Renaud, a Parisian caviste, buys the estate at auction. Treats it as a part-time interest. Continues bottling barrel-by-barrel without homogenizing. Dies 2015.21
  • 2016–2017 — During the unresolved succession, Jean-Marc Grussaute of Camin Larredya vinifies these two vintages on behalf of Renaud's family. He keeps the 2010–2013 stock when ownership eventually transfers.1
  • 2018 – present — Lionel Osmin, a Pau-based négociant, takes over after a long legal process. He inherits the bulk of the Renaud-era cellar (1993–2015, minus what Grussaute kept), and begins systematically releasing it as "Édition Limitée" assortments. He cannot legally make wine in 2020, 2021, or 2022 due to ongoing litigation.1 His first vintage as proprietor is 2018, made at 8 hl/ha.2

How to read a Clos Joliette bottle

On the bottle itself, two things identify the wine: the wax color and the lot code. A third thing — the Édition Limitée number — tells you which original wooden box the bottle was likely offered in, if it was part of a recent set of releases, but it is packaging information about the case, not identity information about the wine inside it. Treat it like a gift box label, not a designation.

The wax color tells you the sweetness

Osmin uses the color of the wax capsule at the top of the bottle to encode residual sugar. (The closest analog is German Riesling's Goldkapsel tradition.) To be clear, this starts with Osmin's stewardship. Two bottles from the same vintage with different wax colors are different wines:

Wax color Residual sugar Style
Green under ~14 g/L sec / dry
Yellow ~15–30 g/L demi-sec / off-dry
Orange above ~30 g/L (occasionally up to 60+) moelleux / sweet

(The earliest Édition Limitée No. 1 release used slightly different thresholds — green under 10 g/L, yellow 10–30 — which Osmin refined to the current 14 / 15–30 numbers by 2024.21)

The wax color is the cuvée identity. Do not strip it from any catalog entry, bottle note, or sale listing.

The lot code tells you which barrel

Osmin introduced a lot-code printed on each bottle:

LXX-CYY

LXX is the last two digits of the vintage year. CYY is the bin (originally barrel) identifier. Thus L97-C93 is from bin 93 of the 1997 vintage; L01-C39 is from bin 39 of the 2001. Each bin in the cellar holds roughly 300 bottles and corresponds to a single barrel, and each barrel produced a different wine, because Migné and Renaud never blended. Osmin tasted through ~140 bins from the Renaud era and selected 24 he considered top quality. Those are the ones being released.2

Two bottles with the same vintage but different lot codes are different wines.

Older bottles often say only "Jurançon"

Migné- and Renaud-era bottles frequently bear no producer name and no sweetness designation — just "Jurançon" on the label. By Osmin's estimate, around 90 percent of those bottles were technically illegal under appellation rules: their RS levels fell between Sec and Moelleux limits.2 These bottles are valuable, drinkable, and largely undocumented.

Why labels say "Joliette" instead of "Clos Joliette"

The name confusion has nothing to do with trademarks and everything to do with appellation rules.

The phrase "Clos Joliette" refers to the vineyard, which means any wine with that label falls under Jurançon AC requirements: Moelleux must be ~50–60 g/L RS or higher, Sec must be quite dry, and there's no official designation for the in-between styles where Joliette's wines actually live. Osmin chose to drop out of the appellation rather than reformulate the wines. So bottles released under Osmin since 2018 are sold as Vin de Table de France and labeled simply "Joliette" — not "Clos Joliette."2

The estate is still universally called Clos Joliette by everyone — critics, retailers, auction houses, importers. That's the recognized name, that's what you search for, that's what should be the canonical producer entry in any catalog. The label difference is a regulatory artifact.

The Édition Limitée OWBs

Osmin packages his cellar selections as themed assortments of six bottles in a wooden case (an OWB). Each release pulls one bottle from each of six different barrels — a deliberate vertical-meets-horizontal that lets the buyer experience Joliette's range in a single case. Initial Osmin pricing was around €1,200 per six-pack at the producer; secondary-market pricing now runs $1,150–$2,500+ depending on edition and country.2345

Note on packaging. The bottles in an Osmin OWB ship wrapped in printed tissue paper. The Édition number — Édition Limitée No. 6, No. 8, etc. — is on the paper wrapper, not the bottle itself. Once the wrapper is removed, the bottle no longer carries any indication of which release it came in.

As of mid-2026, eight numbered Éditions have been released. The rosters below are reconstructed from a combination of producer disclosures, critic articles, and retailer offer pages — the producer does not publish a unified release schedule. Lot codes are included where they appear in the public record (Editions 4, 5, 6, 7); for Editions 1, 2, 3, and 8 the public sources only published vintages and wax colors. (Reminder: each row below describes which barrel was put into which OWB. The wine itself is identified by (vintage, lot, wax) — the OWB number is provenance.)

Édition Limitée No. 1 — 220 sets

The inaugural release. Six vintages, all from the Renaud-era cellar:267

Vintage Wax Style
1997 Green sec
1998 Green sec
2007 Green sec
2002 Yellow demi-sec
2008 Yellow demi-sec
2001 Orange moelleux (84 g/L RS — Castaing's 100-pointer)

Distribution: 3G / 2Y / 1O.

Édition Limitée No. 2

Six bottles, two dry and four off-dry:89

Vintage Wax Style
1994 Green sec
1999 Green sec
1996 Yellow demi-sec
2000 Yellow demi-sec
2002 Yellow demi-sec
2007 Yellow demi-sec

Distribution: 2G / 4Y / 0O.

Édition Limitée No. 3 — €1,850 (Vila Viniteca)

Vintage Wax RS (g/L)
1993 Green <14
1998 Green <14
2000 Green <14
1995 Yellow 15–30
2003 Yellow 15–30
2005 Yellow 15–30

Distribution: 3G / 3Y / 0O — the only documented Edition with no Orange-wax bottle. Spanish retailer Vila Viniteca offered the OWB; Saison Cellar in San Francisco also carried it at $2,535.104

Édition Limitée No. 4

Vintage roster as listed in CellarTracker (one bottle per vintage; wax-color suffix uses French color words instead of the English "Wax" formulation, but the meaning is identical):

Vintage Lot Wax (label uses Petit Manseng <color>)
1994 L94-C54 Verte (Green)
1997 L97-C59 Verte (Green)
1999 L99-C44 Verte (Green)
2003 L03-C68 Jaune (Yellow)
2004 L04-C12 Orange (Orange)
2005 L05-C19 Jaune (Yellow)

Distribution: 3G / 2Y / 1O.

Édition Limitée No. 5

Roster from the No. 5 lot codes that appear in the trade and at retail:

Vintage Lot Wax
1994 L94-C54 Green
1995 L95-C11 Green
2007 L07-C130 Green
1996 L96-C81 Yellow
2005 L05-C23 Yellow
2004 L04-C34 Orange

Distribution: 3G / 2Y / 1O. Note: lot L94-C54 (Green) appears in both Editions No. 4 and No. 5 with the same wax. Either Osmin distributed the same barrel across two editions, or this is a CellarTracker cataloging duplicate between the two edition headings — currently unclear.

Édition Limitée No. 6

Vintage Lot Wax
1994 L94-C49 Green
1996 L96-C70 Green
2002 L02-C06 Green
2007 L07-C117 Green
2009 L09-C108 Yellow
1997 L97-C86 Orange

Distribution: 4G / 1Y / 1O — the driest-leaning of the editions documented to date.

Édition Limitée No. 7 — "Best Case Scenario"

The most fully-documented release in retailer materials, with full lot codes, residual sugar, and alcohol levels for each bottle:3

Vintage Lot Wax RS (g/L) ABV
1994 L94-C45 Green 5.2 14.5%
1996 L96-C87 Green 8.8 15.3%
2000 L00-C31 Green 8.6 16.1%
1997 L97-C97 Yellow 27.9 15.7%
2007 L07-C72 Yellow 10.3 14.5%
2004 L04-C08 Orange 33.9 15.7%

Distribution: 3G / 2Y / 1O. The 16.1% alcohol on the 2000 (despite under-10 g/L RS, i.e., dry) is an interesting outlier — passerillage without botrytis can produce highly concentrated dry wines.

Édition Limitée No. 8 — $2,299.99 (Wine Solutions)

The most recent release tracked publicly, the first to lean sweet:5

Vintage Wax Wine Advocate score
1995 Yellow 97
1997 Orange 92
1999 Green 90
2004 Orange 96
2005 Orange 95
2006 Yellow 95

Distribution: 1G / 2Y / 3O — by far the sweetest distribution to date.

A note on overlapping vintages, lots, and OWBs

A vintage that appears across multiple OWBs (1996 in Nos. 2, 5, 6, 7; 1994 in Nos. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7; 2007 in Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7) does so because each OWB pulls from different barrels, identified by the LXX-CYY lot code. Same vintage, different lots = different wines. That's the cuvée distinction.

But the reverse also happens: the same lot can appear across multiple OWBs. For example, lot L94-C54 Green shows up in both Édition Limitée No. 4 and No. 5 — same barrel, distributed across two releases. Same lot, different OWB = same wine, different packaging. That distinction is provenance, not cuvée.

The wine's identity is (producer, vintage, lot, wax). The OWB is which case Osmin happened to put it in.

Standout scores

Yohan Castaing's Wine Advocate vertical of 23 bottlings spanning 1974–2020 highlights:1

  • 2001 — 100 points (orange wax, lot L01-C39, 84 g/L RS)
  • 2018 — 98 (Osmin's first vintage)
  • 2020 — 98 (small production, see succession note)
  • 1996 — 98
  • 2015 — 97

Neal Martin's earlier Vinous tasting flagged the 1993 (L93-C90) and 1998 (L98-C03) as standouts, and identified the 1994 (L94-C53, 15.7% alcohol) and the 2007 yellow-wax bottling (sulfur error) as compromised.2

The CellarTracker catalog

A search for "joliette" in CellarTracker returns 50+ iWine entries for this single estate, with a number of duplicates, naming inconsistencies, and a deeper data-model issue: most iWines bake the Édition Limitée number into the wine name, even though the Édition is OWB packaging metadata rather than wine identity.

A complete worklist of every issue and recommended fix lives in a separate fragment. It is suitable for sending to CellarTracker support.

A closing note for the curious

Clos Joliette rewards the kind of attention that almost no commercial wine demands. The wines were made by people who couldn't be bothered to homogenize their barrels, in a cellar with an earthen floor and a hundred-year-old basket press, and aged for a third of a decade before bottling. Osmin's contribution has been to inventory what he found, classify it honestly via the wax-color system, and release it without smoothing the variation away. That last bit is the gift. If you find a bottle, look at the wax. Note the lot code. Open it without reverence. And — if you have the chance — taste a green-wax and an orange-wax bottle from the same vintage side by side. They are not the same wine.

References

Further reading

Footnotes

  1. Yohan Castaing, "France, Jurançon: The Legend of Clos Joliette – 1974-2019", Wine Advocate, March 7, 2024. Vertical of 23 bottlings, with the most current account of viticulture, winemaking, the Grussaute interregnum, and the 2020–2022 hiatus. Subscription required. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Neal Martin, "Resurrecting the Mystery: Clos Joliette (Jan 2020)", Vinous, January 28, 2020. The deepest public account of the estate's history and the introduction of the wax-capsule system. Subscription required. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  3. Empire State of Wine (New York), "Clos Joliette Édition Limitée No. 7 - Best case Scenario" (originally at esow.com, listing now retired) — the most detailed public retailer breakdown of any Édition Limitée release, including lot codes, residual sugar, and alcohol levels for each of the six bottles. ↩ ↩2

  4. Saison Cellar (San Francisco), "Clos Joliette Limited Edition N°3 - 6 bottle OWD" — US retailer offer of the No. 3 release at $2,535. ↩ ↩2

  5. Wine Solutions, "Clos Joliette Edition Limitee Vertical Assortment" — the No. 8 release, with Wine Advocate scores per vintage. Pre-arrival pricing $2,299.99. ↩ ↩2

  6. France & Western, "The Mythical Clos Joliette" — exclusive US representative; documents No. 1 release. ↩

  7. Justerini & Brooks, "Clos Joliette, Limited Edition Case [1x08,07,02,01,98,97]" — UK retailer offer with full No. 1 vintage list in the URL itself. ↩

  8. Lobenberg's Gute Weine, "Clos Joliette Sammlerbox: Vintage Édition Limitée No. 2" — German retailer documenting the No. 2 vintage roster and wax distribution. ↩

  9. Shrine to the Vine, "Clos Joliette Limited Edition Case" — UK retailer offer with No. 2 vintage roster and per-bottle tasting notes. ↩

  10. Vila Viniteca (Barcelona), "Clos Joliette Edition Limitée 3 — Caja de madera" — Spanish retailer offer of the No. 3 case at €1,850, with full per-bottle wax and RS data. ↩