Pommard "En Brescul" AOC 2023

A Pommard with grip: dark fruit, firm, fine-grained tannin, and over it all the cool clarity on which the house in Morey-Saint-Denis builds its Pinots. Not a broad wine, but a precisely drawn one, built for length.

The climat En Brescul lies in the village of Pommard, in the southern Côte de Beaune, on limestone and iron-rich soils that give Pinot Noir its dark, earthy spice. The Lignier family has been rooted in Morey-Saint-Denis since the 1880s: Jacques Lignier bought plots back then that phylloxera had devalued, and his son Jules patiently replanted them. Today Laurent Lignier runs the estate in its fifth generation.

Pure Pinot Noir. From 2007 onward, synthetic treatments disappeared from the vineyards; the cellar acquired in 2008 in Morey works entirely by gravity — from the vat to bottling, no pump touches the wine. Long, cool macerations precede fermentation, the proportion of whole clusters has grown over the years, and new oak is deliberately kept restrained and spread across four coopers so that no single barrel marks the wine's character.

Black cherry and blackberry, with cassis, violet and damp forest foliage, finishing with a touch of clove. The tannin is dense and fine-grained, freshness holds the dark fruit upright, and the finish remains clear and long.

In 1973, in the midst of a sales crisis, Hubert Lignier began bottling his own wines instead of selling them in bulk; from a grape supplier emerged an address with its own name. The estate's genetic origin lies in twenty-seven rows of vines that Henri Lignier planted in 1955 in the climat Monts Luisants, from whose wood he propagated the remaining plots in the 1960s.