Nicolas Julhès

History and Terroir

The Origin Story: A Distiller Who Broke the Rules (and the Law—Almost) Before becoming the mad genius of modern distillation, Nicolas Julhès was already obsessed with flavour, scent, and the deep mechanics of how raw ingredients become liquid art. He wanted to blow the doors off convention. And that’s precisely what he did. In 2010, while the rest of the world was sipping mass-market spirits, Julhès had a wild idea: open a distillery in Paris, a city where distilling alcohol had been forbidden for over 100 years. Not in Cognac. Not in Armagnac. In the middle of the capital, as he explains, “Everyone comes to Paris with an open mind searching for exceptional”. He didn’t just want to make spirits; he wanted to make them differently—with style, story, and soul. Alongside his brother, he crowdfunded the dream, battled bureaucracy, and finally opened La Distillerie de Paris in 2015. Tucked inside a quiet passageway, it is a hidden, high-design lab for distillation excellence, a true statement of excellence in the French capital and still the only distillery to date. Armed with a custom Holstein still (a Rolls-Royce in the world of spirits), Julhès launched into uncharted territory, crafting over 90 original spirits, from gins to a controversial style of rhum. Each was an intense adventure and a defiant statement that Paris could, and should, distill again.

Farming and Winemaking

Bridging Wine and Spirits—Like Never Before 2018 was a meeting of great minds when Burgundy's legendary winemaker Jean-Marc Roulot contacted him to create an Eau-de-Vie, led by terroir and specificity, traversing parcel by parcel, evolving through micro distillation into a multitude of different small batch cuvées that express some of Burgundy’s finest terroirs. The grapes are distilled in the Roulot family’s still functioning 150 year old still in Burgundy, and revisions Marc de Bourgogne from the traditional method (where the distillate ages in cask, thereby losing its delicate nuances), towards an Eaux-De-Vies-De-terroir, the purest expression of a certain terroir, maintaining not only the intricacies of the vintage and the specific plots, but even a snapshot of vintage conditions. After several trials beginning in 2019, the 2021 vintage marks the culmination of the method: a non-linear distillation that allows the terroirs to be read, their essential structure to be expressed, and their identity is rediscovered in blind tasting. A connection between great wineries and unique spirits: At the Table: Nicholas suggests serving in small quantities, 1- 2ml. Savour it. On the Palate: Let the essence unfold slowly. It is not drunk like water, nor tasted like wine—it perfumes the palate. In Your Mind: Eau-de-Vie de Terroir doesn’t just blur the line between wine and spirits—it erases it, replacing it with something entirely new.