Domaine Bizot

Jean-Yves Bizot farms about three and a half hectares at Vosne-Romanée, which makes his domaine one of the smallest serious addresses in the Côte de Nuits - his US importer puts total output at around 900 cases a year across every cuvée. He came to wine as a geologist who then studied oenology, returned to the family vines in the early 1990s, and inherited two and a half hectares in Vosne-Romanée and Échezeaux before adding parcels further north in the late 2000s.

The house style is built around a single decision: no sulfur during fermentation or élevage, with at most a minimal dose shortly before bottling. Everything else follows from it. Fruit is sorted obsessively in the vineyard, goes into wooden vats as whole clusters with no destemming, is trodden gently so that many berries stay intact, ferments through a cool carbonic phase with no pumping over, and moves by gravity into barrel. The barrels are all new - not for flavour but because new wood is clean and needs no sulfur treatment, which inverts what a low-intervention reputation usually implies. Bottling is done by hand, cask by cask, unfiltered, each bottle referenced to the barrel it came from. He farms organically and has said plainly that he is not certified and does not wish to be.

Yields are very low even by his neighbours' standards, normally around 25 hl/ha. Two writers who visited report 9 hl/ha in 2016. He also notes that a drop to -25C in December 2009 killed his oldest vines and ended his vieilles vignes bottling after that vintage, which is worth remembering whenever his wines are described in terms of ancient vines.