Domaine Bernard Millot

Domaine Bernard Millot is in Meursault itself, at 27 rue de Mazeray, and it is Emilien Millot who makes the wine. The family has been here a long time. In 1888 his great-great-grandfather Stephen Rougeot wrote up the details of that year's harvest in a notebook, and the notebook has been handed down ever since, filling up with vintages and family events. Emilien farms eight hectares with his parents and two employees, and between them they do all of the work, from pruning through to bottling.

Almost all of the vines are inside the commune of Meursault. There is one plot in Puligny-Montrachet, right on the village boundary, and two wines from Beaune, the premier cru Les Sizies and the Clos des Longes. Within Meursault the domaine is spread across a long list of named plots: Les Crotots and Au Village, Les Terres Blanches, Les Vireuils, Les Petits Charrons, Les Clous, Les Chaumes, Le Buisson Certaut, Les Criots, En Luraule and En la Barre, plus the two premiers crus, Les Perrières and Les Gouttes d'Or. There is also a Bourgogne Côte d'Or, a Bourgogne Aligoté called Les Guets de Bises, a Passe-Tout-Grains, and a couple of Vin de France cuvées including a Syrah called Hommage.

The farming is the part I would want you to know about. The family had worked the soils holistically for forty years, and used a reasoned approach for thirty, before deciding in 2017 to go organic outright; the certification process has been running since 2020. Sulphur and copper are still used, but at a third to a half of the usual rates when the season allows, alongside infusions and decoctions of willow, comfrey and meadowsweet, and a great deal of preventative work in the vineyard: hard disbudding, keeping vigour down, trellising and opening up the canopy. Since 2020 they have been growing strawberries and mint between the rows to cut down on ploughing, and testing winter fleece against spring frost. Around twenty pickers come each year and are housed and fed at the estate.

In the cellar the whites are pressed for three to four hours, settled statically for six to twelve hours, and the juice then falls by gravity into barrel. Fermentation starts with no added yeast, the malolactic follows in the same barrels, and the wine sits on its fine lees for twelve months with no bâtonnage at all. Oak is twenty per cent new, the rest barrels of two to ten uses. Everything is bottled at the domaine.

That last detail is worth pausing on. The rich, stirred-up style that made Meursault famous thirty years ago is not what happens here. These are Meursaults built on the vineyard rather than on the winemaking, and that is why I wanted them.