Fixin La Place 2022

Village. La Place, Fixin. Pinot Noir from 0.41 ha, bought in 2006. Planted in 1973, vines over fifty years old. Guyot simple, hand harvest, about 36 hl/ha. Silt and clay over limestone. Upper Fixin, “en haut de coteaux” in Guillaume’s words, near the Route des Grands Crus, close to the hamlet of Fixey. A gentle slope facing east. Little frost here in 2016, 38 hl/ha that year when the Côte lost much of its crop. Sixteen months in barrel, a quarter new.

Fixin is the northern end of the Côte de Nuits, the first village with its own appellation coming down from Dijon, two villages before Gevrey. The reputation is for hard, four-square, slow wines, the “squarer finish,” and that reputation is mostly about the clay-heavy lower parcels. La Place sits high, on the thin silt-and-clay band under the Route des Grands Crus, the road that threads the top of the slope from here to Corgoloin. Upper Fixin is where the village’s best premiers crus are, Clos de la Perrière, Clos du Chapitre, Les Hervelets, Les Arvelets; La Place is village land just among them. The parcel is a 20-minute drive from the cellar in Vosne, the farthest the domaine goes north.

Guillaume reads his soils by their parts: clay gives structure, silt softens, sand gives freshness. Fixin’s silt is his answer to Fixin’s tannin.

Fully de-stemmed with two thirds of the berries kept whole, a week cold before fermentation starts on its own, warmed slowly with few punch-downs. Aged sixteen months in barrel on the fine lees under CO₂, sulfur added late, racked once before bottling.