CLOS SAINTE MAGDELEINE
A Vineyard Held by the Sea
In Cassis, a historic fishing village on the Mediterranean, Clos Sainte Magdeleine remains rooted in wine, family, and the sea.
The first three times I visited Clos Sainte Magdeleine, I thought I understood its beauty. On my fourth, I realized I had only seen part of it.
The estate occupies an improbable stretch of land at the edge of Cassis, where vineyards descend toward the Mediterranean and Cap Canaille rises across the bay. The house, built by the family after it acquired the property in 1921, is instantly recognizable, with an architectural character unlike anything else along this part of the coast. Beyond it are the historic cellar, the lower vineyards beside the sea, and a view that has taken my breath away in every season I have experienced it.
This time, however, Jonathan Sack led us higher, into the terraced vineyards climbing the slopes above the estate.
From below, the terraces can appear to be part of the larger beauty of the property. From within them, their significance becomes clearer. These are not decorative vines surrounding an exceptional coastal residence. They are narrow, demanding agricultural parcels built into the hillside, each level creating enough ground for vines to take hold.
Known locally as restanques, the terraces are one of the defining features of Clos Sainte Magdeleine. They reveal the amount of work required to farm this coastline and show how elevation, exposure, soil, and the mountain itself create meaningful differences across a relatively small estate.
This was my first time climbing into them. From there, the property felt less like a single vineyard beside the sea and more like a collection of distinct places, rising from the lower parcels near the water toward the slopes of Cap Canaille.
Only 10 estates based in Cassis continue to produce wine today, with another domaine headquartered just outside the commune. The scale of the appellation is remarkably small, particularly when compared with the international visibility of the town itself.
Standing among the upper terraces, it is difficult not to consider how easily viticulture could have disappeared from this place.
Cassis has become one of the most desirable towns on the French Mediterranean. The land at Clos Sainte Magdeleine could support almost any number of more immediately profitable uses. A hotel, private residences, or some other form of luxury tourism would hardly seem out of place here. Today, it is difficult to imagine a contiguous property of this beauty and scale becoming available at all.
Yet Clos Sainte Magdeleine remains a remarkably small operation. The entire domaine is run by a team of only six people, including Jonathan and his wife, Aurélie. Together, they are responsible for maintaining the vineyards and terraces, producing the wines, and carrying forward a property whose history and reputation might suggest a much larger organization.
That scale makes the work feel even more consequential. The preservation of the estate is not the result of a large institution or an expansive hospitality business. It depends on a small group of people doing the daily agricultural work required to keep this land planted.
The fact that it remains a working vineyard is not accidental. It is the result of a decision made repeatedly across generations, and sustained today by a team small enough that each person’s contribution is visible.
A Family Comes Ashore
The Zafiropulo family had searched for land in Cassis for more than 20 years before Clos Sainte Magdeleine became available.
What they found was not simply a place to live or a spectacular coastal holding. It was already a working wine estate, with cellars dating to the nineteenth century and a viticultural history that predated the family’s arrival.
In 1921, Georges Zafiropulo, a Marseille industrialist of Greek origin, acquired the property. The family built the residence that remains one of the estate’s most recognizable features, and its descendants have continued the work for more than a century.
The family’s relationship with the Mediterranean, however, began long before it owned vines above the sea.
Jonathan described his ancestors as merchants who had been established in Marseille for generations, with a business reaching across the Mediterranean. He recalled connections to Istanbul and North Africa, part of the larger commercial world that made Marseille one of Europe’s most consequential port cities.
The details of that business history still deserve further documentation, but what is clear from Jonathan’s family account is that the Mediterranean was central to their livelihood long before it became the defining physical presence of their vineyard.
That gives the family’s arrival in Cassis a different resonance. A merchant family whose world had been shaped by the movement of goods across the Mediterranean spent decades searching for a permanent piece of land beside that same sea.
At Clos Sainte Magdeleine, movement became permanence. Commerce became cultivation.
The remarkable part of the story is not only that the family found the property. It is what successive generations have chosen to do with it.
The estate remains devoted principally to wine. A small amount of olive oil is produced for the family, but the land has not been reshaped around tourism or developed to capture the full commercial value of its location. The vineyard continues to occupy ground that could almost certainly generate more money through another use.
Preserving Clos Sainte Magdeleine does not simply mean retaining a family asset. It means continuing to choose agriculture in a place where agriculture is no longer the most obvious economic choice.
A House Under Occupation
The family’s first decades at Clos Sainte Magdeleine soon collided with one of the hardest periods in modern European history.
During the Second World War, the house was completely occupied by soldiers. Jonathan told us that Italian and German troops were quartered there at different points, taking over the family residence and placing the property inside the military occupation of France’s Mediterranean coast.
The sequence reflected the shifting control of southern France.
After France fell in 1940, Cassis remained within the territory administered by the Vichy government. That changed in November 1942, when the Allied landings in North Africa prompted Germany and Italy to occupy the previously unoccupied southern zone. Italian forces assumed control of much of southeastern France, including sections of the Mediterranean coast.
That occupation lasted less than a year. When Italy agreed to an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, German troops moved quickly into the territories previously controlled by their Italian partners. German occupation of the region continued until the liberation of southern France in 1944.
For Cassis, the war was intensified by geography. The same qualities that make the coastline extraordinary also made it strategically valuable. The hills, cliffs, sheltered coves, and elevated viewpoints provided visibility across the Mediterranean and potential access from the sea.
By 1943 and 1944, German forces were constructing defenses along the southern coastline in anticipation of an Allied invasion. The Mediterranean Wall, known as the Südwall, stretched across southern France, with artillery positions, bunkers, observation points, and other fortifications intended to defend ports and possible landing areas.
Clos Sainte Magdeleine sat directly within that vulnerable coastal landscape. Its position offered commanding views across the bay and the open water. What today feels like an almost impossibly peaceful setting would then have been valuable for many of the same physical reasons: elevation, visibility, and immediate proximity to the coast.
The history adds another dimension to the family’s stewardship of the estate. They had spent more than 20 years searching for land in Cassis, only to lose control of their house within the first generation of ownership. The home became military quarters. The bay below it became part of a defended coastline. The vineyards survived inside a landscape reshaped by occupation and war.
In August 1944, Allied forces landed farther east during Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Provence. French and Allied troops advanced through the region as they moved toward Toulon and Marseille. Marseille was liberated later that month.
The house remained. The vineyards remained. The family returned to the work.
That survival should not be treated as a passing detail in the estate’s history. Clos Sainte Magdeleine has endured not only changing markets, tourism pressure, and a warming climate, but also a period when the family home was occupied and the Mediterranean below it became part of a European battlefront.
Evidence Beneath the Vines
Jonathan took responsibility for the vineyards and cellar from his father, François, in 2008. For him, stewardship does not mean preserving the property in a fixed state. It means deciding what must remain, what should be recovered, and what must change.
During our walk, he told us about a discovery that altered the way he understood that responsibility.
In the middle of one of the lower vineyards beside the sea, Jonathan found a fragment of a Roman amphora.
The object itself was small, but the meaning of it stopped him. He had to step away and sit alone for several minutes, trying to absorb what he had found and what it suggested about the ground beneath him.
The fragment connected the property to a much older Mediterranean wine culture. For Jonathan, it suggested that wine had been produced, stored, or transported on this same site during the Roman era.
It was not simply an archaeological curiosity. It was reassurance.
The discovery connected his work to a history much older than his family’s century at Clos Sainte Magdeleine. It confirmed something he had felt about the site and the purpose of the work being done there. The story of wine on this land did not begin with his generation, or even with his family’s arrival in 1921.
It also offered another way to think about inheritance.
Jonathan inherited an extraordinary property, but he also inherited the responsibility of preparing it for conditions its previous farmers did not face. The vineyard may be ancient, but the climate problem is immediate.
Cassis has always been warm, dry, and bright. Its position beside the Mediterranean, its surrounding hills, and the mass of Cap Canaille create a distinct coastal environment. The sea moderates temperatures and brings regular movement of air, while differences in elevation, slope, and exposure create smaller climatic variations within the estate.
But moderation is not immunity.
Heat is increasing. Dry periods are becoming more severe. The varieties planted in the vineyard must not only ripen, but remain functional through prolonged periods of intense sunlight and limited water. Jonathan’s challenge is to protect the identity of Clos Sainte Magdeleine without pretending the conditions around it have remained fixed.
That has led him to reconsider some of the assumptions that shaped planting decisions in the past.
Marsanne and Roussanne are varieties more readily associated with the northern Rhône. Both were planted in Cassis, in part because of the weight and reputation they could bring to white wine. Marsanne remains an important component of the estate’s Cassis Blanc, alongside Ugni Blanc, Clairette, and Bourboulenc.
But Jonathan questions whether Marsanne, and particularly Roussanne, are the grapes best equipped for the future of an increasingly hot site. His attention is turning toward varieties with longer histories in the Mediterranean and a greater ability to function under heat and drought.
Clairette and Ugni Blanc may not carry the same market status as more famous white varieties, but their value at Clos Sainte Magdeleine lies in what they can do rather than what their names communicate. They can preserve acidity, withstand heat, and contribute structure under conditions that can overwhelm less adapted vines.
Returning his attention to these varieties is not nostalgia. It is a practical response to the vineyard Jonathan now farms.
The same thinking extends to the plant material used for future vineyards.
Jonathan is increasingly focused on sélection massale, taking cuttings from individual vines within his own parcels that have demonstrated health, quality, and suitability to the site. Rather than planting future vineyards entirely from standardized nursery clones, he is building a population from the estate’s own best-performing vines.
The goal is not uniformity. It is to preserve genetic diversity and gradually develop plant material more specifically adapted to Clos Sainte Magdeleine.
This is necessarily slow work.
A grower identifies vines, takes cuttings, propagates them, replants, and waits. Years pass before the results can be evaluated properly. The full value of the work may not become visible until another generation is responsible for the property.
At Clos Sainte Magdeleine, that long view seems appropriate.
The family acquired the estate after a search lasting more than two decades. It has kept the property intact for more than a century. The amphora fragment connects the land to wine activity nearly two millennia earlier. Jonathan’s selections are being made for vineyards that will have to function in a climate still taking shape.
The Flagship of Cassis
The range at Clos Sainte Magdeleine reflects the same balance between continuity, recovery, and adaptation. But one wine remains at its center.
Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Blanc is the flagship of the estate and its most important wine.
It is the bottle through which most people first understand the domaine and, in many ways, the wine that most clearly represents Cassis itself.
Provence is now so closely associated with rosé that it is easy to forget how unusual Cassis is within the region. Here, white wine has long held the strongest historical identity. Cassis was recognized as an appellation in 1936, making it one of the earliest appellations established in Provence.
Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Blanc comes from the estate’s vineyards and brings together the varieties that have shaped that tradition, principally Marsanne, Ugni Blanc, Clairette, and Bourboulenc.
It carries the larger story of the property: the maritime climate, the limestone, sandstone, and marl soils, the lower vineyards beside the bay, and the elevated parcels rising toward Cap Canaille.
The wine is raised primarily in stainless steel, with a portion aged in large-format wood. The approach allows the vineyard and varieties to remain at the center rather than making élevage the dominant feature.
This is also the wine in which Jonathan’s thinking about the future becomes most consequential. His renewed focus on Clairette and Ugni Blanc, his concerns about heat, and his long-term work with sélection massale are not side projects. They are part of protecting the identity and future of Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Blanc.
The estate also produces Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Rosé, a serious estate wine from the same maritime landscape. It belongs to the agricultural identity of the domaine and should not be reduced to the broader tourism market surrounding Provençal rosé.
A smaller set of wines allows Jonathan to explore individual parcels, varieties, and parts of the estate’s history.
Bel-Arme comes from old vines on the high terraces of Cap Canaille. Its northern exposure and steep limestone restanques make it a distinct expression of those elevated parcels. The wine is important within the range, but the terraces matter beyond any single bottling. They help explain the structure of the estate itself, the labor required to farm it, and the changing conditions Jonathan must navigate.
Baume-Noire takes another direction. Made entirely from Vermentino, or Rolle, grown on limestone terraces, the wine is fermented in large sandstone jars. It reflects Jonathan’s interest in Mediterranean varieties, site-specific plant material, and different approaches to élevage.
The domaine has also brought Cassis Rouge back into production. Its return recovers a nearly forgotten part of the estate’s range and reminds us that Cassis has never been exclusively an appellation of white and rosé, even if red wine represents only a small portion of production today.
Beyond the estate wines, Jonathan and Aurélie also produce a separate selection range from vineyards elsewhere in Provence.
An IGP Méditerranée Blanc and a Côtes de Provence Rosé are made from selected sites beyond Clos Sainte Magdeleine and vinified by the family. The white brings together Vermentino, Ugni Blanc, and Clairette from a higher, north-facing site. These wines are offered at a more approachable price than the Cassis bottlings and extend the family’s work beyond the boundaries of the domaine without confusing them with the estate-grown range.
Together, the wines describe a domaine that is neither fixed in the past nor chasing novelty.
The Cassis Blanc holds the center. The Rosé extends the estate’s maritime expression. Bel-Arme isolates the high terraces. Baume-Noire explores Vermentino and another form of élevage. Cassis Rouge recovers part of the region’s history. The selection wines broaden the family’s work beyond the estate.
But the flagship remains Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Blanc. It is the wine that carries the greatest weight of the property’s history, Jonathan’s viticultural decisions, and the future of the estate.
Returning to the Water
It would be easy to write about Clos Sainte Magdeleine only in terms of beauty.
The view is unavoidable. So are the architecture, the water below the vineyards, and the physical scale of Cap Canaille. The property seems capable of overwhelming anyone seeing it for the first time.
After four visits, at different times of year, I still have not become accustomed to it.
On this visit, we experienced the estate from the water as well as the vineyards.
We swam into the bay and around the point of the domaine, with the property rising above us and the Mediterranean extending in every direction. From the water, the terraces and house became part of the larger coastline. The vineyard no longer appeared to end at the edge of the land. It felt inseparable from the bay below it.
The blue of the water stays fixed in the imagination long after leaving Cassis. It is the same water that moderates the vineyards, reflects light toward the slopes, and carried the family’s earlier history as Mediterranean merchants. It helped form the rock beneath the vines and, centuries later, made the coast strategically important during the war.
Every time I taste the wines of Clos Sainte Magdeleine, I return to that water.
This is not because the wines offer a literal taste of the sea, or because every coastal wine must be described as saline. It is because they speak so specifically of where they come from.
The Cassis Blanc, Rosé, Bel-Arme, Baume-Noire, and revived Rouge each bring back a different part of the property: the lower vineyards beside the bay, the high terraces, the limestone and marl, the reflected sunlight, and the constant presence of moving air and water.
The wines make the location visible again.
That may be one of the clearest measures of a wine’s connection to place. It does not simply remind you of a flavor or aroma. It returns you to the physical experience of being there.
After four visits, what stays with me is not only that Clos Sainte Magdeleine is beautiful. It is that the beauty has survived through patience, work, and a series of decisions that were never economically inevitable.
A merchant family spent more than 20 years searching for land in Cassis before finding this property. The house was later occupied by Italian and German soldiers during the war. More than a century after the family arrived, its descendants continue to keep the land planted to vines despite the commercial possibilities surrounding them.
Jonathan’s amphora fragment places that stewardship into an even longer frame. The Romans were making, storing, or moving wine here before Clos Sainte Magdeleine had a name. Jonathan is selecting plant material now for conditions that will be faced by the people who farm the property after him.
From the upper terraces, those spans of time seem to meet.
Below is the vineyard where the amphora fragment was found. Beyond it is the Mediterranean that shaped the land, carried the family’s earlier life as merchants, and brought occupation to the coast during the war. Around us are vines selected from the best material already growing on the property, intended for a warmer and less predictable future.
Later, from the water, the same story looked different. The house and vineyards appeared almost impossibly settled into the coastline, as though they had always been there and always would be.
Of course, that is not how places survive.
The first thing Clos Sainte Magdeleine takes from you is your breath. What the estate reveals, over time, is how much work it has taken to preserve the view.
