A Tiny Appellation in the Shadow of a Famous Clos
The commune of Vougeot, in the Côte de Nuits, owes its name to the Vouge, the river that runs through it. Two appellations coexist there, and confusion is common: the village AOC vougeot, the subject of this page, and the grand cru AOC clos-vougeot, which is not a premier cru but an appellation in its own right. The first has only 11.99 hectares in red and 3.87 hectares in white; the second covers 50 hectares 96 ares and 54 centiares, about 50.97 hectares — the largest grand cru of the Côte de Nuits.
The production of the village appellation follows suit: 405 hectolitres of red on average, of which 315 are premier cru, and 162 hectolitres of white, of which 124 are premier cru. In other words, the majority of what is produced under the name vougeot is ranked premier cru — the reverse of the situation in most villages of the Côte, where village-level areas are largely dominant.
The Terroir: The Côte de Nuits Cuesta and the Vouge Slope
Vougeot belongs to the cuesta edge that marks the western limit of the Saône plain, along a network of faults running south-south-west to north-north-east. The beds date from the Mesozoic, chiefly the Jurassic: from top to bottom, the white oolitic limestones of the Middle Bathonian, known as "pierre de Comblanchien", which form the summit of the Côte; the Lower Bathonian limestones, the "pierre de Prémeaux"; the Upper Bajocian marls with Ostrea acuminata, those small fossilised oysters; then the Bajocian crinoidal limestones, on which the upper part of the Clos de Vougeot rests.
The surface soils are made of limestone scree fallen from the top of the Côte, of red silts deposited in the glacial periods, of the weathering of the underlying beds and of earth carried back up by hand. The slope of the Vouge descends gently towards the east. Inside the clos the contrast is clear and well documented: gravelly and stony in the upper part, more clayey lower down, but free-draining everywhere, with soils that dry out quickly after rain. The climats of the village appellation are spread around this clos, which occupies the heart of the slope: only four — Clos de la Perrière, Le Clos Blanc, Les Crâs and Les Petits Vougeots — carry the premier cru mention.
Climate: Temperate with a Slight Continental Tendency
The climate is temperate with a slight continental nuance, with rainfall spread across the year, pronounced winters and hot summers punctuated by storms. Eastern exposure and the gradient of the slope do the rest: the morning sun warms the rows, and the excellent drying of the soils limits excess water, two decisive conditions for a pinot noir susceptible to grey rot.
As everywhere in the Côte-d'Or, the calendar has shifted. As early as 1422 the archives record August harvests in the Côte de Nuits; the 1865 vintage was both very early and very rich in sugar. The heatwave of 2003 saw some estates harvesting in mid-August, a month ahead of the usual rhythm.
The Style of the Wines: Red from Pinot, White from Chardonnay
The reds come exclusively from pinot noir, a variety with small, tight bunches and dark blue ovoid berries, delicate and susceptible to downy mildew as well as grey rot. It accumulates sugars easily for a medium acidity, and gives deeply coloured, rich wines of moderate tannin and good ageing potential. Ageing classically runs from twelve to twenty-four months before fining, filtration and bottling.
The whites, rare in this part of Burgundy, come from chardonnay, which buds slightly earlier than pinot noir and is therefore exposed to spring frosts. It reaches good sugar levels while retaining acidity, which gives balanced, ample and rich wines, aged on lees with bâtonnage. This white production is far from anecdotal at Vougeot: it accounts for about a quarter of the appellation's area, against a few per cent in most of its neighbours.
The Clos de Vougeot: A Distinct Grand Cru AOC
The distinction bears repeating, because on a label it decides everything. Clos-vougeot is an autonomous grand cru, recognised as an AOC in 1937, one year after the village appellation vougeot. Its history is Cistercian: the abbey of Cîteaux received land on the banks of the Vouge from 1100, had the clos planted with pinot noir from 1111, and the name appears in a bull of Pope Alexander III in 1164. The monks walled it around 1330, then divided it into three climats under Clement VI in order to select the "cuvée du pape", alongside the "cuvée du roi" and the "cuvée des moines". The present château was raised in 1551 by dom Jean XI Loisier; since 1944 it has belonged to the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin.
Confiscated at the Revolution, the clos passed to the banker Ouvrard in 1818, then was sold in 1889 to fifteen merchants from Beaune, Dijon and Nuits-Saint-Georges: the fragmentation began. Today more than eighty different clos-vougeot are made each year, from parcels ranging from 2.5 hectares to 21 ares, at a yield of around 35 hl/ha. Geologists at the BRGM have shown that fragmentation has not erased the terroir: the wine remains "systematically finer and more delicate in the higher parts and heavier at the foot of the slope". The best land is the upper ground, lean and stony, around the château, from Petit Maupertuis in the south to Montiottes Hautes in the north.