Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Les Terres Blanches

Les Terres Blanches is one of the parcels Nicolas Morin picks out, as the French merchant Marée Haute puts it. White Nuits-Saint-Georges is rare, and the appellation allows Pinot Blanc beside Chardonnay. Nuits has a precedent for it: in the 1930s Henri Gouges found a Pinot Noir in his vines that bore white grapes, and his domaine's white Nuits still comes from that vine.

Berry Bros. & Rudd, writing about another grower's bottling from the same climat, describe it as cut into the treeline high on the hill, with stony soil over oolitic limestone.

The 2023 went into a single barrel that had held one wine before. It fermented on its native yeasts and spent its élevage on the lees. It was bottled unfiltered, on a day chosen by the lunar calendar, and the whole cuvée came to 283 bottles.

The cuvée comes back year after year. Norway's Vinmonopolet listed the 2020 as pure Pinot Blanc as well, spontaneously fermented and aged in small old barrels, and merchants in Hong Kong and France have sold the 2019 and the 2021.