Côte de Clairaux · Burgundy · anno 1715
On the hill the berries turn, one by one, from green to shadow.
The berries soften and blush. We drop fruit, thin leaves around each cluster, and wait for the hill to decide the vintage.
Turn the year — the estate follows
Nothing at Clairaux is decided in the cellar. The wine is decided on the hill, week by week, in the four seasons the dial above turns through. We farm 9.4 hectares by hand, without herbicide, on slopes too steep for machines and too old for shortcuts.
Each season has its own verbs. In spring we prune late and pray against frost. In summer we thin. In autumn we pick — every berry by hand, usually in fifteen days. In winter the vines sleep and the wine is racked once, quietly, in the cold.
Now on the estate: leaf-thinning in Les Argillières, and the first ruby berries in the Clos.
A frost year that forgave us. Small crop, fine bones, the kind of perfume the Côte gives once a decade.
The night of 22 April we lit candles in the Clos and lost only the low rows. What survived ripened slowly through a cool August and came in clean on 21 September. Yields are down a third — so the 2024s are allocated, as every vintage since 1998, in the order requests arrive.
Clairaux premier cru · monopole
Pinot noir · walled clos of 1715
The founding parcel behind the chapel, ours alone for eleven generations. Whole-cluster, aged 18 months in one new barrel of four.
€68 / bottle
Request allocationClairaux premier cru
Pinot noir · mid-slope clays
The deepest clay seam on the hill gives the darkest wine we make — blackberry, iron, a long mineral close.
€54 / bottle
Request allocationClairaux villages
Chardonnay · below the oak wood
Our only white: a cold, late parcel under the treeline. Pressed whole, no bâtonnage — chalk, green apple, gunflint.
€38 / bottle
Request allocationClairaux villages
Pinot noir · planted 1962
Grandfather Marcel's plantings, gnarled and low-yielding. The wine we drink at our own table, and the first to sell out.
€42 / bottle
Request allocationAllocations open 1 September and close when the cellar is empty — most years, before All Saints'. Requests are answered by Camille, in the order they arrive.
The hill of Clairaux is a broken stair of Jurassic sea-floor, tilted east. Forty centimetres of brown earth, then marl, then the pale Comblanchien limestone that built the cathedrals of Burgundy — and the cellar under our house.
Old vines send roots four metres down through the fissures. That is where the wine's salinity comes from: rain that fell in winter, filtered through 160 million years of compressed seashells, drawn back up in August.
The domaine has never been bought or sold. It has only been handed on — with the vines, the cellar key, and a ledger that opens in 1715. Each line below is a life spent on the same hill.
* Marcel took over at 26 when his father died in the vines; he signed the ledger for both of them.
In the 1743 cellar · one hour
Five wines drawn from barrel and bottle, poured by Jules or Camille under the vaults their ancestor dug. You will taste the 2024s before they are born.
Book a tasting
At the family table · three hours
Walk the clos, then sit down to a Burgundian lunch with the family: six wines back to 2015, œufs en meurette, and whatever the season says.
Book the tableDuring vendanges the cellar closes to visitors — but if you write kindly, you may be handed secateurs instead.