Domaine de Montille

Domaine de Montille is in Volnay, on the rue du Pied de la Vallée, and Etienne de Montille runs it. Brian Sieve is the cellar master. Etienne's son Louis started training in 2022 and would be the tenth generation of the family in wine.

The estate dates from the 1730s, when the Chauvelot de Chevannes family settled in Volnay and built the house; the vat house, which is now the offices, went up around 1776. It took the de Montille name in 1863, when Léonce Bizouard de Montille married Éléonore Chauvelot de Chevannes. In the nineteenth century the family held around thirty hectares, including parcels in Musigny and Bonnes-Mares, but phylloxera and the sales that followed stripped it back to roughly two and a half hectares by the end of the Second World War.

What happened next is the reason people know the name. In 1947 Hubert de Montille, orphaned at seventeen, took on what was left. He qualified as a lawyer and kept practising, and spent the rest of his life buying vineyards back parcel by parcel. At a time when more than ninety per cent of Burgundy went to the négoce in a standardised style, he made wines of terroir built to age, and he said so loudly enough that his appearances in Jonathan Nossiter's film Mondovino are still quoted. That is worth knowing before you buy: this domaine's reputation was never built on wines that are easy young.

Etienne picked his first harvest in 1983 and became co-manager in 1995, the year he decided to convert the estate to organic farming. The move had actually started in 1985, when the chemical fertilisers went; the synthetic fungicides and insecticides followed in 1995. In 2002 he gave up his Paris law practice for a domaine of nine hectares. Between 2003 and 2005 he bought the Thomas Moillard vineyards in partnership with the Seysses family of Domaine Dujac, which took de Montille back into the Côte de Nuits with Vosne-Romanée Aux Malconsorts and Clos Vougeot, brought the domaine to sixteen hectares, and saw biodynamics extended across the whole vineyard. In 2012 the domaine bought Château de Puligny-Montrachet outright, adding about fifteen hectares of white wine vineyard including Meursault Perrières and Poruzots, Puligny-Montrachet Folatières, Saint-Aubin En Rémilly and Chevalier-Montrachet. Today it farms thirty-seven hectares, most of it premier and grand cru, across the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits.

Organic first, then biodynamic, and the order matters, because the two words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The preparations, including the 500, are made at the domaine, with the cow horns buried in the Clos du Château de Puligny-Montrachet parcel. There is no deep ploughing and some parcels are still worked by horse.

The reds are fermented with a high proportion of whole bunches, a third to all of it depending on the wine and the year, and see five to forty-five per cent new oak. The whites ferment in 228 and 600 litre barrels with five to thirty-five per cent new oak (fifteen on average), little or no bâtonnage, then four to six months in stainless steel to hold their freshness.

The regional wines, the Bourgogne Pinot Noir and the Bourgogne Chardonnay, are the entry wines. They are made in the same cellar and by the same people as the Volnay and Pommard premiers crus and the grands crus, and they are the least expensive way into this domaine.