Although Pascal Doquet established his own estate as recently as 2004, he has been making wines under his parents’ label, Doquet-Jeanmaire, since 1982. His family’s winemaking roots extend even further back: André Jeanmaire, Doquet’s maternal grandfather, was a winegrower in Le Mesnil, and began making wine in 1933 under the Jeanmaire label in response to the grape crisis of the time. The Jeanmaire brand was sold in the 1970s, eventually becoming connected with Château Malakoff, and today both houses are part of the Laurent-Perrier group. In 1974, however, Jeanmaire’s daughter Nicole and her husband Michel Doquet founded the Doquet-Jeanmaire estate, and their son Pascal began working with them eight years later.

Pascal took charge of Doquet-Jeanmaire in 1995 and made the wines until 2003, and following that, as is often the case with wineries in France, the estate was divided among several siblings upon their parents’ retirement. Doquet established his own brand as a Société Récoltant (SR) with a portion of the family vineyards, and today he farms 8.66 hectares of vines, devoted entirely to the Pascal Doquet label since 2004—while he still has some old stocks of Doquet-Jeanmaire wines for sale, he discontinued the label and stopped making those wines after the 2003 harvest.

The vineyards are planted with 95 percent chardonnay and five percent pinot noir, and they lie in several different areas, across a diversity of soil types. A little over five hectares are in the Côte des Blancs, all at the southern end: 1.67 hectares are in the grand cru of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, lying on very chalky soil, and more than two hectares are in Vertus and Bergères-les-Vertus, where the deeper soils contain more clay as a result of being part of a former estuary. Just south of Bergères, Doquet has 1.2 hectares of vines on Le Mont Aimé, an outlying butte of yellow chalk, silex and sand that is completely different in its geological makeup than the rest of the Côte des Blancs. The remainder of the vines, nearly 3.5 hectares, are in the communes of Bassuet and Bassu, in the Perthois region near Vitry-le-François, where the slopes are built on grey clay mixed with chalk.