Monthélie 1er Cru AOC 2023

The Monthélie 1er Cru AOC 2023 is a dry red wine at 14.0 % vol. that continues the line of Domaine Hubert Lignier: cool precision, clearly delineated structure, a build aimed at length and clarity rather than power.

Monthélie lies in the Côte de Beaune, while the domaine itself is based in Morey-Saint-Denis in the Côte de Nuits, where the Lignier family has farmed vines since the 1880s. Back then, Jacques Lignier bought plots devalued by phylloxera; his son Jules patiently replanted them. Hubert Lignier took over the estate's direction in 1959 and decided in 1973 to bottle the wines himself rather than sell them in bulk to merchants. Since 2013, Laurent Lignier has led the house, the fifth generation on the same land.

The cuvée combines Pinot Noir and Gamay. Long, cool maceration periods precede fermentation, and the proportion of whole clusters has grown over the years. The cellar in Morey-Saint-Denis, acquired in 2008, operates by gravity alone: from must to bottling, no pump touches the wine. Laurent Lignier deliberately limits new oak and spreads it across four coopers so that no single barrel dominates the wine.

The estate's plant selection traces back to twenty-seven vine rows planted in 1955 by Henri Lignier in the Monts Luisants climat; from their wood he propagated, in the 1960s, through mass selection, vine by vine, his remaining plots. Synthetic products disappeared from the vineyards starting in 2007.