The Grand Cru Lowest on the Slope
The Romanée-Saint-Vivant extends below the Romanée-Conti, between the village of Vosne-Romanée, which it almost touches, and the road that separates it from the premier cru Les Suchots to the north. It is the last step of the slope of the grands crus: beyond it begin the premiers crus of the lower slope, then the vosne-romanée village wines. This low position is the key to its personality, and the reason why it was long considered the least prestigious of the commune's grands crus.
It is also the largest: 9.40 hectares in production as recorded by the BIVB in 2022, against 1.81 for the Romanée-Conti and 5.94 for La Tâche. It has never been a monopole, despite a long period during which a single family held most of it, and it is today shared among a handful of estates, of which only one, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, holds more than half.
The Terroir: Deeper, More Clayey Soils
The BIVB describes for the Romanée-Saint-Vivant soils close to those of the Romanée-Conti — brown limestone, strongly clayey — but deeper: about 90 centimetres, against 60 at its neighbour. The proportion of clay there approaches half of the soil. The base remains the hard Premeaux limestone, Jurassic in origin, of the order of 175 million years old, but it lies here further beneath the feet of the vine.
This detail changes everything. On the mid-slope grands crus the rock almost outcrops and the vine works in a lean, free-draining soil; here it has at its disposal a water reserve and a more generous volume of earth. The climat is moreover an exception in the geological reading of the Vosne slope: whereas the Romanée-Conti, Richebourg, La Tâche and La Grande Rue all rest on the same succession of Marnes à Ostrea acuminata and limestones, the Romanée-Saint-Vivant, lower down, does not follow that sequence. The result is a wine less immediately powerful, longer to settle into place, but of a recognisable fineness of weave.
Climate and Exposure
Like the whole vineyard of Vosne-Romanée, the climat faces east, sometimes slightly east-south-east, on a slope whose vines are tiered between 250 and 310 metres in altitude. The Romanée-Saint-Vivant occupies its lower part, where the gradient eases markedly. The general regime is that of the Côte de Nuits: temperate with a semi-continental tendency, cold winters, wet and frost-prone springs, hot summers broken by storms.
The foot of the slope pays the price of its position: cold air flows down and accumulates there, which exposes it more to spring frosts, and the clayey soils drain more slowly after rain. Conversely, in dry and hot vintages — increasingly frequent — this water reserve becomes an asset and ripeness is reached without excess sugar. Warming has moreover largely contributed to the reassessment of the cru since the 1990s.
The Style: Lace Rather Than Power
The robe is a deep red tending to purple, limpid and intense. The nose is the most floral of the slope: rose, cherry, incense, a minty edge and a background of sweet spices. On the palate the matter is silky rather than massive, the tannic weave fine, the length mouth-watering. Where Richebourg imposes and La Tâche unfolds, the Romanée-Saint-Vivant suggests — that is what tasters call, for want of anything better, its femininity.
It is a slow wine. It hardly gives itself up before five to ten years, unfolds between twenty and thirty years and can hold for half a century in exceptional vintages. Opened too early, it seems austere and one wrongly concludes that it is a minor grand cru; that is the misunderstanding that long weighed on its reputation. Served between 15 and 16°C, it accompanies feathered game, wild fowl and roast veal — meats less powerful than those called for by its neighbours at mid-slope.
The Priory of Saint-Vivant de Vergy
The abbey of Saint-Vivant was founded in the Hautes Côtes, near the château de Vergy, some ten kilometres from Vosne, around a reliquary of a Poitevin saint brought by a community fleeing the Norsemen; it was formally submitted to Cluny in 1087 and became one of the great Cluniac priories of northern Burgundy. On 13 November 1131, Duke Hugh II of Burgundy ceded to it what he possessed "in all the uncultivated land of Flagey and Vosne, in wood and in fields". The monks cleared the ground and planted.
Between 1232 and 1246, Alix de Vergy, wife of Duke Odo III, completed these holdings with five donations that included the Cloux des Neuf Journaux (3.06 ha), the Cloux du Moytan (1.70 ha) and the Cloux des Quatre Journaux (1.36 ha) — a little more than six hectares of the present grand cru — as well as the Cloux des Cinq Journaux, the nucleus of the future Romanée-Conti. The priory would farm these vines for nearly six centuries, until the Revolution. Its ruins were bought back in 1996 by a land-holding group formed around the co-managers of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and a preservation association was set up in 1999.
A Borrowed Name, and Two Centuries of Sharing
The name is not original. Marie-Hélène Landrieu-Lussigny has shown that "La Romanée de Saint-Vivant" appears for the first time in 1765, in a lease signed by the abbey of Saint-Vincent: the monks of Saint-Vivant, seeing the prestige acquired since 1651 by the neighbouring lieu-dit "En la Romanée" — which the prince de Conti had just bought in 1760 — had extended the name to their own vineyard. The climat therefore bears, literally, the name of its neighbour's success joined to that of its owner.
Confiscated at the Revolution, the property of the priory was sold in 1791 to Nicolas-Joseph Marey, son-in-law of the geometer Gaspard Monge; the Marey-Monge family would hold most of the climat for nearly seventy years before the first sales. In 1898 the Clos des Quatre Journaux passed to Louis Latour; other parcels followed. In 1966, Geneviève Marey-Monge entrusted the remaining 5.28 hectares to the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti under a tenancy agreement, with an option to purchase in the event of a sale; the Neyrand heirs ceded it to the estate definitively in 1988. In the survey published by Winehog in 2017, the sections from the Clos des Quatre Journaux and from the former Domaine Thomas-Moillard were divided between Louis Latour (0.80 ha), the Poisot family (0.50 ha), Robert Arnoux (0.35 ha), Domaine de l'Arlot (0.25 ha), Sylvain Cathiard (0.17 ha) and Dujac (0.17 ha) — a breakdown to be read at its date, since parcels change hands.