Domaine David Moreau

Jean Moreau’s people had a few vines in Santenay-le-Haut; it was Jean and his wife Simone who, in 1959, made a domaine of them, moving down the hill in the sixties into the old outbuildings of the Château Philippe le Hardi, on the rue de la Bussière, above a vaulted cellar the Guide Hachette dates to the fifteenth century and the family to the sixteenth. For fifty years the wine went out as Domaine de la Buissière, most of it to the négoce. The first vine the two of them planted together was Les Cornières, in 1972, and it is still the heart of the cuvée that carries Simone’s initial.

David’s father did not want the vines. “But since I was very passionate about it,” David says, “my grandfather stayed on until I could take over the domaine. When I arrived he was eighty years old.” The Hachette called it fait peu courant en Bourgogne: a domaine that skipped a generation. In between, David did his oenology at the University of Burgundy in Dijon and went to learn from people who would not have taken a Santenay boy on sentiment: François Perrin at Beaucastel, Olivier Lamy over the hill in Saint-Aubin, Aubert de Villaine at the Romanée-Conti, and Tim Finn at Neudorf in Nelson, New Zealand, where, he says, “I saw a very different way of making wine. It was a bit more scientific. Not as much feeling. In Burgundy you feel what you are doing.” He was working beside his grandfather from 2004 and took the domaine formally in August 2009, four or five hectares under his own name at first, making the rest to his grandfather’s rules until Jean retired at eighty-five and the whole nine hectares came to him in 2013. Simone kept working. “She never stops. I’m not even sure she sleeps.” She died in the autumn of 2021, at eighty-nine, the week Jasper Morris came to taste the Cuvée S.

My only aim is to explain each terroir, to get the best out of each plot.

David Moreau

Santenay is three villages pretending to be one. On the Chassagne side, the slope runs down toward the Dheune and the premiers crus sit on the same limestone as Morgeot: this is where the domaine’s emblem comes from, the Clos des Mouches (mouche being, in the local patois, a bee), nine-tenths of a hectare on a windy ridge between Passetemps and Beauregard, a few dozen centimetres of soil on the limestone slab, left unplanted from phylloxera until the family put vines back in 1964. The smallest premier cru in the village, and most of it is theirs. Pruned Guyot because the wind would snap a cordon, grassed between rows to keep the bunches small, and the most delicate wine in the cellar: violets and red fruit, which is why David uses the fewest stems here, “because the vineyard provides a naturally floral character.” Beside it, Les Hâtes, planted 1967 (old French for early: the sheltered ground that ripens first), kept at home only since 2016, and Les Prarons, the long fields on the river alluvium where the white grows against the Chassagne line.

Above the village, the hill rises past the old windmill: Beaurepaire, a slope of more than twenty per cent planted 1992, chalky and pure in red and a white David calls haute couture; and higher still, at three hundred and forty metres on white marl, Beauregard, from which on a clear day you can see the Jura and the Alps. Then the Maranges side, toward Cheilly, where the only premier cru is the Clos Rousseau: the family’s first premier cru, planted 1962, red with iron oxide and so thin that Bill Nanson measured ten centimetres of soil in places and David says there are corners you cannot plant at all. “It’s more masculine, more spicy and has a lot of power.” It is always the first picked. Over the line in Maranges itself, Aux Gryphées is three parcels of 1940s vines on Liassic limestone full of fossil oysters and sand washed down from the Morvan. It is the one holding the grandparents did not plant. And in Meursault, seventeen ares of Les Pellans under Charmes at the Puligny border, 1940 vines so old and virused they give tiny seedless berries. Everything is replanted from the domaine’s own massale selections, grafted by David himself; there is not a clone on the property.

No weedkiller, no insecticide, light tractors on dry ground only, ploughed and grassed by turns, Cordon de Royat where the vine is too vigorous and Guyot-Poussard where it is not, pruned late against the frost. He follows the organic rulebook and declines the certificate; the Hachette noted, a little surprised, that he “admits to being more interventionist in the vines than in the cellar,” which is the right way round. Harvest by hand into ten-kilo crates, sorted on a table at the end of the row in daylight, where the best bunches are picked out to go in whole.

Then the cellar does very little. Five to twenty per cent whole cluster by cuvée and year (a tenth in the Clos des Mouches, a fifth in Cuvée S and Beauregard, more in the Maranges); into concrete by gravity, no pump, no sulphur, no added yeast; one punch-down a day until the middle of the fermentation, one pump-over a day after, and the length of the maceration decided at the tasting bench, around a fortnight. Twelve months in barrel, new oak from nothing on the Bourgogne to about a third on the premiers crus, then three to five months in steel to settle, and bottling on a fruit day of the waning moon. Whites are pressed whole-cluster and slowly (two and a half hours for the Meursault), settled overnight and fermented in 300- and 350-litre barrels, left on their lees until bottling, with the Beaurepaire blanc given no new wood at all “to make sure that it finds its freshness.” He dates his own style to 2013: gentle extraction, elegance of structure, wines that will age. The frost of 2021 took two-thirds of the crop and he bottled early rather than dry out what was left. “A wine is born above all from a terroir,” the website says, and the cellar is arranged so that nothing argues with it.

Un vin naît avant tout d’un terroir.

David Moreau

Bill Nanson of the Burgundy Report, who was first, in 2012: “Already one of the best addresses in Santenay!” And of the 2011 Clos Rousseau, “very, very silky – as good as any Volnay could offer.” Of the 2016s: “What a simply brilliant cellar in 2016 – one of the best for consistency too – bravo David!” Neal Martin, Vinous: “David Moreau has enjoyed a purple patch in recent vintages as he fine-tunes his art… demonstrate how the choicest Santenay vineyards can create beautiful and elegant wines,” and of the 2022 Clos des Mouches, 92–94, “smooth tannins, very sensual for a Santenay… What a beautiful Santenay this is going to be.” William Kelley, Wine Advocate, 92 on the 2020 Clos des Mouches: “rose petals, red berries, plums and raw cocoa… supple, powdery tannins and a fleshy core of fruit.” Jasper Morris MW on the 2020 Cuvée S: “remarkably elegant for such a powerful vintage.” Bourgogne Aujourd’hui gave the 2015 Clos Rousseau 18/20 (Très grand vin!) and the Hachette a coup de cœur to the 2011 Cuvée S, “born of the first vine his grandfather planted.” Decanter on the whites: “David Moreau has an impressive touch with his whites,” the Meursault Pellans “intensely racy and refreshing.”

What all of them are circling is the thing the essay above says plainly: this is premier cru quality from a village that still prices itself as a village. Clos Rousseau is Martin’s perennial favourite; the Clos des Mouches is everyone else’s.

David Moreau has enjoyed a purple patch in recent vintages as he fine-tunes his art.

Neal Martin, Vinous