Vosne-Romanée

The village

Vosne-Romanée fits in a pocket handkerchief. Between Dijon to the north and Nuits-Saint-Georges to the south, the village stretches along the foot of the slope, and its vineyard covers about a hundred and fifty hectares in production. Into that small area are packed six grands crus of its own and fourteen climats classified as premier cru.

The appellation makes red wine only, and one grape counts: Pinot Noir. The specification permits Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris as accessory varieties, but only interplanted among the vines and up to 15 % of any plot — a relic of the old Burgundian field blend that changes nothing about the colour of the wine.

The village has not always borne this name. Until the nineteenth century it was simply Vosne; the commune then bolted on the name of its most prestigious cru, la Romanée, as Gevrey did with Chambertin and Chambolle with Musigny. That act of naming tells you everything about the Burgundian hierarchy: the plot makes the village famous, not the other way round.

The appellation is produced across two communes: Vosne-Romanée and Flagey-Échezeaux. Flagey has no village appellation of its own. Its two grands crus — Échezeaux and Grands-Échezeaux — are free-standing appellations, but its village wines are sold under the Vosne-Romanée label, and three of its climats (En Orveaux, Les Rouges, and part of Les Beaux Monts) are classified as premier cru of Vosne-Romanée. A bottle of Vosne-Romanée may therefore come from ground that is not in Vosne at all.

The history is old and monastic. The abbey of Saint-Vivant de Vergy, founded around 890 up in the Hautes-Côtes, owned vines and a press house here — hence the name Romanée-Saint-Vivant. Flagey, for its part, answered to Cîteaux, firmly established since the twelfth century on the neighbouring land of Vougeot. In the seventeenth century the Prince de Conti bought the clos that would carry his name. In 1778 the abbé Courtépée called Vosne the head of the Burgundy wines renowned throughout Europe. In 1936 Gaston Roupnel called it the pearl of the Côte. The AOC was recognised the same year, by the decree of 11 September 1936.

The hierarchy of climats

Burgundy classifies places, not proprietors. That is the deep difference from Bordeaux, where the 1855 classification ranks châteaux — trading houses whose vineyards can and do change. Here the ground is classified, and the ranking outlives every sale.

The pyramid has four tiers, from the broadest to the narrowest.

Regional appellations — Bourgogne, Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, Coteaux Bourguignons — cover wide areas, often on the plain or the plateaux, and allow the highest yields. Part of the land of Vosne and Flagey falls into them.

Village appellations carry the name of a commune: Vosne-Romanée is one. The yield drops to 50 hectolitres per hectare, the minimum natural alcohol rises to 10.5 %, and the minimum sugar content of the grapes to 180 grams per litre of must.

Premiers crus are not separate appellations: they are complementary geographical denominations of the village appellation. You write "Vosne-Romanée premier cru Les Suchots", never "AOC Les Suchots". The yield falls to 48 hectolitres per hectare, the minimum natural alcohol rises to 11 % and the sugar content to 189 grams. The appellation's specification names the fourteen climats entitled to the mention; a grower may also blend several of them and sell the wine as plain "premier cru", with no climat name.

Grands crus are appellations in their own right: Romanée-Conti is an AOC, not a mention of Vosne-Romanée. That is why the village name never appears on the label. The yield falls to between 35 and 42 hectolitres per hectare depending on the cru, and the minimum natural alcohol to 11.5 %. There are eight of them around Vosne: six in the commune of Vosne-Romanée, two in Flagey-Échezeaux.

This hierarchy is not a tasting scoreboard; it is a reading of the slope, fixed first by custom and then by law. The 1943 ruling that settled the list of Vosne's premiers crus rested on a classification of the "crus of the Côte" dating from 1860 — itself heir to Jullien's observations of 1816 and Courtépée's of 1778. What the map records is two centuries of tastings that agreed with one another. The Climats du vignoble de Bourgogne — 1,247 named plots across the Côte — were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 4 July 2015 for precisely that reason: they are a model of terroir-based viticulture built over the long term.

Reading the slope

Everything is decided over a hundred and fifty metres of vertical drop and a few hundred metres of width. The Côte de Nuits escarpment is a fault scarp running north-south: to the west, the limestone plateaux of the Hautes-Côtes, between 400 and 500 metres; to the east, the Bresse plain, a collapsed trough whose altitude is close to 250 metres where it meets the Côte. Between the two, the slope faces east and south-east — it takes the morning sun, which dries the dew, and shelters from the prevailing westerlies behind the Morvan.

The mid-slope band, between 250 and 300 metres — the upper piedmont, growers' "mi-pente" — is the heart of the whole arrangement. That is where the grands crus are, and nowhere else. Each cru's specification states it with a surveyor's precision: Romanée-Conti between 260 and 270 metres; Richebourg between 260 and 290; Romanée-Saint-Vivant, the lowest, between 247 and 260; La Tâche, which crosses the slope in a narrow strip, between 250 and 300; La Grande Rue between 250 and 290; Échezeaux, over in Flagey, between 260 and 300.

The vocabulary is worth untangling, so the essay does not contradict itself from one paragraph to the next: the specifications of these same grands crus place their plots "en piémont du relief" or "en piémont du versant" — on the piedmont of the scarp — where trade usage calls this same band the "mid-slope" ("mi-pente"). Both describe the same ground from two angles: the grower's mid-slope is the upper part of that geological piedmont, the junction between the scarp and its foot-slope — the well-drained cone of marl and limestone scree — above the deeper soils of the plain and below the thin, cold soils of the upper slope.

What makes this band unique is an accident in the limestone sequence. The bones of the relief are Middle Jurassic limestones — Bajocian and Bathonian — including the exceptionally compact Comblanchien limestone. But a bed of Bajocian marl, that is, of clayey limestone, is interleaved in that sequence low on the slope. Being softer, it erodes faster and carves a slight shelf, a concavity, into the topography. That is exactly where Romanée-Conti, Richebourg and La Romanée sit: in the hollow generated by the Bajocian marl bed, as the official text puts it.

The clay in those marls holds water; the fissured limestone beneath drains it away. The vine is therefore neither thirsty nor waterlogged — a water balance that neither the top nor the bottom of the slope reproduces. Over the bedrock lies a thin blanket of colluvium — a few decimetres to a metre at most — mixing limestone scree with clays and silts washed down from the heights above. Those clays are so rich in iron oxides that they give the soil its characteristic red, visible the moment you scrape a row.

Above this band, the incline steepens, soils turn skeletal and very stony, and bedrock breaks the surface here and there. This is the country of the upper-slope premiers crus: Les Petits Monts, Aux Raignots, Cros Parantoux, Aux Brulées, Les Beaux Monts, Les Rouges, En Orveaux. Grapes ripen later, and the wines gain in tension and perfume what they lose in flesh.

Below it, in the lower piedmont and the plain, the foot-slope flattens out over Tertiary conglomerate formations — limestone blocks and cobbles set in salmon-pink marl — and the clay-silt spreads thicken to as much as half a metre. This is the ground of the village wines and of the lower premiers crus: Les Chaumes, Clos des Réas. Lower still, beyond the road — the old RN 74, now the D 974, which runs along the foot of the Côte — the soil becomes too deep and too fertile: you leave the village appellation for the regional ones.

The rule fits in one sentence, and it is the one the grower applies every day: the higher you go the leaner, stonier and colder the soil; the lower you go the deeper, clayier and more fertile it gets; and quality lives in the narrow band where those two gradients cross. Two combes — steep-sided dry valleys walled by limestone cliffs — cut into the slope and qualify the picture: they draw a current of cool air, and at their mouths their alluvial fans lay down stony, very well-drained ground, on which Échezeaux and Grands-Échezeaux are seated.

The climate, finally, is cool oceanic: around 730 millimetres of rain a year, spread without marked summer drought, and an annual mean of 10.5 °C. The Côte enjoys a thermal shelter and a rainfall deficit that are both notable for the region, east of the Morvan — and it is this microclimate, not the latitude, that makes Pinot Noir ripenable here.

The Grands Crus

Romanée-Conti — 1.81 hectares, a monopoly of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. The climat occupies the exact centre of the marly concavity, between 260 and 270 metres, on a gentle east-facing incline. The thin red soil covers the Bajocian marls and then, lower down, crinoidal limestone. Average production: 46 hectolitres a year, barely more than six thousand bottles. Lowest permitted yield in Vosne, along with La Tâche: 35 hectolitres per hectare.

La Romanée — 0.85 hectares, a monopoly of the Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair. Directly above Romanée-Conti, on a slightly sharper incline, in the same hollow but with soft frost-shattered limestone over the marls. The arithmetic of its surface makes it the smallest appellation d'origine contrôlée in France. Yield: 38 hectolitres per hectare.

La Tâche — about 6 hectares, a monopoly of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. At the southern end of the slope, in a narrow strip running the whole way down between 250 and 300 metres: crinoidal limestone and marl at the bottom, soft Bathonian limestone at the top, Tertiary conglomerate to the east near the village. That traverse of several terroirs is what accounts for the wine's complexity. Yield: 35 hectolitres per hectare.

Richebourg — about 8 hectares of delimited area, shared between several estates. North of Romanée-Conti, between 260 and 290 metres, gently sloping in the same marly hollow. The soils, strongly clayey but well drained by the limestone beneath, give the broadest and fleshiest wines of the Vosne grands crus. Yield: 42 hectolitres per hectare.

Romanée-Saint-Vivant — 9.4 hectares. The lowest and deepest-soiled of the six: it occupies a slight shelf overlooking the village, between 247 and 260 metres, on crinoidal limestone and, towards the east, on the Tertiary conglomerate with its salmon-pink marl matrix. Its name keeps the memory of the abbey of Saint-Vivant de Vergy. Yield: 42 hectolitres per hectare.

La Grande Rue — 1.65 hectares, a monopoly of the Domaine François Lamarche. A narrow band running down the slope between 250 and 290 metres, caught between La Tâche to the south and Romanée-Conti to the north. The geography promised it grand cru rank; it nonetheless stayed premier cru until the decree of 2 July 1992, which makes it the youngest grand cru of the Côte de Nuits. Yield: 42 hectolitres per hectare.

To these six are added, in the commune of Flagey-Échezeaux, Échezeaux (36 hectares in production, spread across several named plots between 260 and 300 metres at the mouth of a combe) and Grands-Échezeaux (9 hectares tucked at the foot of the Côte on the alluvial fan, immediate neighbour of the Clos de Vougeot). These are free-standing appellations: you will never read "Vosne-Romanée" on their labels.

The Premiers Crus

The AOC Vosne-Romanée specification names fourteen climats entitled to the "premier cru" mention. Here they are in the spelling of the official text, read from the top of the slope downwards.

High up, on the steep incline and the skeletal soils: Aux Brulées (4.6 hectares, above Richebourg, reputedly the warmest and earliest-ripening), Cros Parantoux (1 hectare hemmed in between Aux Brulées and Richebourg, cleared with the pick and revealed by Henri Jayer from the 1950s onwards), Les Petits Monts (3.7 hectares in narrow terraces just above Richebourg and La Romanée), Aux Raignots (1.6 hectares directly above La Romanée), Les Beaux Monts (12 hectares straddling the two communes), and, over in Flagey, Les Rouges (2.6 hectares) and En Orveaux (1.9 hectares), the northernmost and highest of them all.

At mid-slope and on the piedmont: Les Suchots (13 hectares, the largest of the fourteen, between Richebourg and Échezeaux), Les Gaudichots (0.8 hectares in three fragments wrapped around La Tâche, what survives of a historically far larger climat), La Croix Rameau (0.6 hectares, the smallest, immediately below Romanée-Saint-Vivant).

Low down and to the south, where the soil thickens: Les Chaumes (6.9 hectares below La Tâche and Aux Malconsorts), Aux Malconsorts (5.9 hectares at the southern tip, continuing the Boudots of Nuits-Saint-Georges, often named among the premiers crus closest to grand cru rank), Au-dessus des Malconsorts (1.1 hectares perched just above it) and Clos des Réas (2.1 walled hectares south-east of the village, a monopoly of Domaine Michel Gros).

Three of these climats lie wholly or partly in the commune of Flagey-Échezeaux: En Orveaux and Les Rouges entirely, Les Beaux Monts across the boundary. They are sold as Vosne-Romanée premier cru all the same.

Two points of spelling, because they catch people out. The official text writes Aux Brulées without a circumflex and Aux Raignots, where the trade writes "Brûlées" and "Reignots". And it keeps Les Rouges in the list of classified climats, while its own list of registered place names for Flagey reads "Les Rouges du Dessus" — the same ground under two names.