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.
SHOP THE WINES OF CLOS SAINTE MAGDELEINE
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. 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 appellation is remarkably small, especially when compared with the international visibility of the town itself.
Cassis has become one of the most desirable towns on the French Mediterranean, and it is difficult to imagine a contiguous property of this beauty and scale becoming available today, much less remaining devoted to agriculture. Yet Clos Sainte Magdeleine continues to operate with a team of only six people, including Jonathan and his wife, Aurélie. Together, they maintain the vineyards and terraces, produce the wines, and carry forward a property whose history and reputation might suggest a much larger organization.
Its survival as a working vineyard reflects a decision renewed across generations and carried forward through the daily work required to keep the land planted.
A Family Comes Ashore
The Zafiropulo family had searched for land in Cassis for more than 20 years before Clos Sainte Magdeleine became available.
In 1921, Georges Zafiropulo, a Marseille industrialist of Greek origin, acquired the property. The estate already had a history of wine production and cellars dating to the nineteenth century. The family built the residence that remains one of its most recognizable features and has continued the work for more than a century.
Jonathan described his ancestors as merchants who had been established in Marseille for generations, with a business extending across the Mediterranean, including connections to Istanbul and North Africa. Long before the family owned vines above the sea, its livelihood was tied to the routes crossing it.
That history gives their arrival in Cassis a particular resonance. A family whose commercial life had been shaped by movement across the Mediterranean spent decades looking for a permanent place beside it. At Clos Sainte Magdeleine, the relationship with the sea shifted from trade to cultivation, from movement to continuity.
The family has continued to devote the estate principally to wine, along with a small amount of olive oil made only for its own use. The property has not been reshaped around tourism or developed to capture the full commercial value of its location. In a town where land of this kind carries extraordinary value, maintaining it as agriculture has required an active and repeated choice.
Occupation and Survival
The family’s first decades at Clos Sainte Magdeleine soon collided with the Second World War.
Jonathan told us that the house was completely occupied, first by Italian soldiers and later by German troops. After the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, Axis forces moved into the previously unoccupied southern zone of France. Italian forces controlled much of southeastern France until September 1943, when German troops replaced them following Italy’s armistice with the Allies.
Cassis’s geography made it strategically important. The same cliffs, coves, hills, and elevated viewpoints that now define the beauty of the coastline also offered visibility across the Mediterranean and access from the sea. German forces fortified sections of the southern coast as part of the Mediterranean Wall in preparation for a possible Allied invasion.
Clos Sainte Magdeleine sat within that defended landscape. The family had spent more than 20 years searching for land in Cassis, only to lose control of the house within the first generation of ownership. The property survived the occupation, and after the liberation of Provence in 1944, the family returned to the vineyards and resumed the work.
Evidence Beneath the Vines
Jonathan took responsibility for the vineyards and cellar from his father, François, in 2008. His idea of stewardship is not based on preserving the property in a fixed state. It involves deciding what should remain, what can be recovered, and what must change.
During our walk, he told us about finding a fragment of a Roman amphora in one of the lower vineyards beside the sea. The object itself was small, but the implications were not. He stepped away and sat alone for several minutes, trying to absorb what it suggested about the ground beneath him.
For Jonathan, the fragment connected the property to a much older Mediterranean wine culture. It suggested that wine had been produced, stored, or transported on this same site during the Roman era. More than an archaeological curiosity, it offered a kind of reassurance that the work being done at Clos Sainte Magdeleine belonged to a history far older than his family’s arrival in 1921.
That long history now sits beside a distinctly modern challenge.
Cassis has always been warm, dry, and bright. The sea moderates temperatures and brings regular movement of air, while the slopes and varied exposures create smaller climatic differences within the estate. But the region is becoming hotter, and dry periods are increasingly severe. The varieties planted in the vineyard must not only ripen, but remain functional through prolonged heat and limited water.
Jonathan has begun to reconsider some of the assumptions that shaped planting decisions in the past. Marsanne and Roussanne, varieties more closely associated with the northern Rhône, 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.
He now questions whether Marsanne, and particularly Roussanne, are the grapes best equipped for the future of an increasingly hot site. His attention is turning toward Clairette and Ugni Blanc, varieties with longer Mediterranean histories and a greater ability to retain acidity and continue functioning under heat.
This is less a return to the past than a practical response to the vineyard he now farms.
The same thinking extends to the plant material used for future vineyards. Jonathan is increasingly focused on sélection massale, taking cuttings from the healthiest and best-performing vines within his own parcels. Rather than relying entirely on standardized nursery clones, he is developing plant material selected from the estate itself.
The goal is to preserve genetic diversity and build future vineyards from vines already demonstrating their suitability to Clos Sainte Magdeleine. It is slow work, measured over years and generations, and its full value may not be visible until someone else is responsible for the property.
The Flagship of Cassis
The range at Clos Sainte Magdeleine reflects the same balance between continuity 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. Jonathan describes it as the heart of his production and the wine that most fully represents the geology, vineyards, and traditional winemaking of Cassis.
Provence is now so closely associated with rosé that it is easy to overlook the unusual history of Cassis. Here, white wine has long defined the appellation, and the Cassis Blanc is the bottle through which most people first understand both the domaine and the region.
The blend brings together Marsanne, Ugni Blanc, Clairette, and Bourboulenc. The proportions can shift by vintage, but a recent bottling was composed of 40 percent Marsanne, 30 percent Ugni Blanc, 25 percent Clairette, and 5 percent Bourboulenc. The vines average approximately 40 years of age and are spread across nine hectares of organically farmed clay and limestone soils.
Marsanne gives the wine breadth, while Clairette and Ugni Blanc are increasingly important to Jonathan’s thinking about its future. Their ability to retain acidity and continue functioning in heat makes them particularly useful as Cassis becomes warmer and drier. Bourboulenc, present in a smaller proportion, is another Mediterranean variety valued for its acidity and late ripening.
The fruit is fermented with indigenous yeasts. Most of the wine is raised in stainless steel, while a portion ferments and ages in two 500-liter demi-muids. It remains on its fine lees until bottling in the spring or early summer and is bottled without fining or filtration. The restrained use of wood gives the wine breadth without separating it from the maritime site or the character of the varieties.
The Cassis Blanc gathers together much of the estate in a single wine: the lower parcels near the water, the slopes climbing toward Cap Canaille, the movement of air from the bay, and soils formed from limestone, sandstone, marl, and material carried down from the mountain. Jonathan’s work with Clairette, Ugni Blanc, and sélection massale is ultimately part of protecting the identity of this wine as the vineyard changes.
The estate also produces Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis Rosé in much smaller quantities. It comes from maritime parcels on the slopes of Cap Canaille and near the Plage de l’Arène, including vines very close to the water. The wine is based principally on Grenache and Cinsault as part of a three-variety blend. Rather than being treated as a secondary tourism wine, it is produced from the same serious coastal vineyards and is capable of developing in bottle.
A smaller group of bottlings allows Jonathan to examine particular parcels, varieties, and parts of the estate’s history.
Bel-Arme is produced from old vines planted on the limestone restanques directly along the sides of Cap Canaille. The terraces face north, moderating their exposure to the strongest afternoon heat. The wine is fermented with indigenous yeasts, aged on its fine lees for several months, and bottled without fining or filtration. Bel-Arme is one expression of these elevated parcels, but the importance of the terraces extends beyond the bottling. They reveal the physical structure of the estate and the labor required to farm vines on the mountain.
Baume-Noire takes a different approach. It is made entirely from Vermentino, or Rolle, selected through a massal selection planted on limestone terraces facing the Mediterranean. The parcel has a northwestern exposure, which helps reduce the impact of the strongest heat. Fermentation takes place with indigenous yeasts in 1,000-liter sandstone jars, followed by élevage without fining or filtration. The combination of variety, exposure, and vessel makes it one of the most distinctive wines in the range.
The domaine has also brought Cassis Rouge back into production. The red comes from a single sloping parcel on the side of Cap Canaille, facing the sea and rooted in clay-limestone soil. It is harvested and vinified at the estate and represents the return of a category that had disappeared from the domaine’s modern range. Red remains a very small part of Cassis today, but its revival restores another piece of the appellation’s history.
Beyond the wines grown at Clos Sainte Magdeleine, Jonathan and Aurélie produce a separate selection range from sites elsewhere in maritime Provence.
The IGP Méditerranée Blanc is a blend of Vermentino, Ugni Blanc, and Clairette grown on an unusual north-facing limestone plateau at approximately 400 meters, along the edge of a forest. The grapes are directly pressed and the wine is raised in stainless steel. The cooler exposure and elevation give Jonathan another way to work with Mediterranean white varieties outside the warmer coastal parcels of Cassis.
The Côtes de Provence Rosé comes from selected sloping clay-limestone vineyards near the Mediterranean, including sites around La Ciotat and La Cadière-d’Azur. A recent vintage combined Grenache, Cinsault, Mourvèdre, and Syrah. The grapes are harvested from those selected vineyards and vinified by Jonathan in the cellar at Clos Sainte Magdeleine.
These selection wines are offered at a more approachable price and allow the family to work beyond the boundaries of the domaine. They remain clearly distinct from the estate wines, which are produced exclusively from vines at Clos Sainte Magdeleine.
The range has expanded, and some of its smaller bottlings explore individual sites or ideas, but the Cassis Blanc remains the central expression of the domaine. It carries the broadest picture of the property and the greatest weight of Jonathan’s decisions about what the vineyard has been and what it will need to become.
Returning to the Water
After four visits, at different times of year, I still have not become accustomed to the beauty of Clos Sainte Magdeleine.
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. From there, the terraces and house became part of the larger coastline, and the vineyard felt inseparable from the Mediterranean below it.
Every time I taste the wines of Clos Sainte Magdeleine, I return to that water. Not because the wines offer a literal taste of the sea, but because they speak so clearly of where they come from. They bring back the lower vineyards beside the bay, the high terraces, the reflected sunlight, and the constant movement of air and water.
That may be the clearest measure of their connection to place. They do not simply recall a flavor or aroma. They return me to the physical experience of being there.
What remains with me after four visits is not only the beauty of Clos Sainte Magdeleine, but the amount of work required to preserve it. A merchant family searched for more than 20 years before finding the property. The house survived wartime occupation. The vineyards have remained planted despite the commercial possibilities surrounding them. Jonathan is now selecting vines for conditions that will be faced by the people who farm the estate after him.
From the water, the house and vineyards appear almost effortlessly settled into the coast. The longer one spends there, the clearer it becomes that their survival has required exactly the opposite.
