Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Damodes

Les Damodes lies in the northern part of Nuits-Saint-Georges, above Les Boudots and close to the Vosne-Romanée line, as Joseph Drouhin describes the climat. The name is best known as a premier cru: Drouhin and Louis Latour both bottle one. Frédéric Cossard's wine from Les Damodes carries the village appellation instead.

The vines grow on brown limestone with fine gravel and a share of clay and silt, according to Culinaries, a French merchant that carries the range. The same merchant describes the winemaking: the grapes macerate as whole bunches, and the wine then spends about a year in barrel.

That makes this the wood side of Cossard's work. Several of his cuvées now go into qvevri, the buried Georgian clay jars, and Culinaries also lists a later Damodes Qvevris bottling. The 2020 is the barrel version. Tregalli, an Italian merchant, describes Cossard's general approach as spontaneous fermentation without added yeasts and no sulphur during vinification.

The year was an unusual one. Jasper Morris's Inside Burgundy calls 2020 the earliest harvest on record for most producers, after a hot, dry summer. The red crop was small, and the main worry with Pinot Noir was how little juice the berries held. A climat known for its premier cru, picked in one of the earliest harvests on record, and left to a grower who adds as little as he can.