Côte de Nuits-Villages Aux Boulardes 2022

Village. Aux Boulardes, Comblanchien. Pinot Noir from 1.39 ha, the domaine’s largest parcel, planted in two campaigns, 1966 to 1969 and 1989. Silty clay over limestone. Sixteen to eighteen months in barrel, a quarter new.

Added in 2021, and 2021 was the first vintage. Guillaume that autumn, after a frost year: “Lucky to have added 1.2 hectares of Côte de Nuits Villages so this can help a lot in recovering the lost value.”

Comblanchien is the last village of the Côte de Nuits, south of Nuits and Premeaux, where the slope runs out and the quarries begin. The village’s name is the stone: Comblanchien limestone, the hard pale “pink marble” cut here for a century and used from the Opéra Garnier to the Paris métro. The appellation Côte de Nuits-Villages covers the two ends of the Côte that have no village appellation of their own, Fixin and Brochon in the north, Comblanchien and Corgoloin in the south.

The rank is modest; the geology is not. Geologists use the village’s name for the whole formation: the Comblanchien limestone is the hard Bathonian bed that runs the length of the Côte de Nuits, the bedrock under the upper slopes of Vosne, Chambolle and Gevrey. The vines here sit on the same limestone the grands crus sit on, not on the plateau above it, and the soil over it is thin, silty clay that drains fast and holds little water. Boulardes is the Côte’s rock with a different name. South of Nuits the slope faces more east-south-east and the stone holds heat, which is why the fruit reads darker than the Hautes-Côtes.

Fully de-stemmed and left uncrushed, a week cold before fermentation starts on its own, warmed slowly with few punch-downs. Aged sixteen to eighteen months in barrel on the fine lees under CO₂, sulfur added late, racked once before bottling.