Vosne-Romanée

Domaine Bizot is Jean-Yves Bizot, who farms about three and a half hectares at Vosne-Romanée, having returned to the family holding in the early 1990s. He came to it as a geologist who then studied oenology, and the domaine has stayed at that scale ever since, with his US importer putting total output at around 900 cases a year across every cuvée.

The plain Vosne-Romanée is not a single site. His importer gives it as a blend of four village plots - Les Communes, Les Jardins, Les Colombières and Les Saules - running to roughly a hectare, with vines planted in 1930, 1944, 1950 and 1980. It sits alongside two other village bottlings, Les Jachées and Les Réas, which he keeps separate. Worth knowing when reading anything about old vines here: Bizot has said that a drop to -25C in December 2009 killed his oldest vines and ended his vieilles vignes cuvée after that vintage.

The winemaking is unusual and internally consistent. Fruit is sorted hard in the vineyard, goes into wooden vats as whole clusters with no destemming, is trodden gently so many berries stay intact, ferments with a cool carbonic phase and no pumping over, then moves by gravity to barrel. No sulfur goes in during fermentation or élevage, at most a very small dose shortly before bottling. Because he works without sulfur he uses only new barrels, which are clean and need no treatment - the opposite of what a low-intervention reputation usually implies. Bottling is done by hand, barrel by barrel, without filtration. He farms organically but has said plainly that he is not certified and has no wish to be.

Yields are tiny by any measure, normally around 25 hl/ha, and 2016 was brutal: two separate visiting writers report 9 hl/ha that year. The late April frost that defined the 2016 vintage fell very unevenly, and Vosne-Romanée as a commune came through better than most - Méo-Camuzet's own vintage note calls the village "largely spared" while neighbouring Chambolle lost about a third and Marsannay, at the northern end of the slope, considerably more. Downy mildew then arrived in a humid May, the rain stopped after June, and a warm, sunny July and August delivered a healthy, ripe harvest from late September. Where the frost did land it landed row by row, so a commune-level figure says little about any one grower's parcels.