Maison Pierre Brisset

Pierre Brisset is not from a wine family and did not study wine. “My studies pointed me toward finance,” he says, “then I threw myself into the French new economy”; he co-founded and ran the travel site VoyagerMoinsCher.com, in the years when that was an eccentric thing to do, and sold it in 2010. What he had done with the money along the way was buy and drink wine, seriously, all over the world, narrowing from Bordeaux to the Rhône to Champagne to the place he calls, without irony, the Grail. He describes himself as un vrai amateur de vins, au sens noble du terme: an amateur in the old sense, one who loves the thing. “I walk the ground to know the best parcels in premier and grand cru. I meet growers, I spend time with them, to understand the subtle distinctions between good and great terroirs.”

“I searched a long time. I was looking for a vineyard I would fall in love with. I found it in 2013 in the heart of the Côte de Beaune — a premier cru Morgeot.” Two ouvrées, a few hundred bottles’ worth, at the foot of the abbey. The Maison Pierre Brisset was founded on it with the 2014 vintage, and the parcel opened doors: “from that acquisition we had access, in 2015 and 2016, to rare grands crus” (Échezeaux from 2015, Corton-Charlemagne in 2016). The grapes are bought, not the wine; he makes and raises everything himself, in the old Burgundian model of the négociant-vinificateur. The growers he buys from are not named on the label, and he will tell you who they are in person.

Since 2015 the house has lived at the Château de Bligny-lès-Beaune, south of the town between Pommard, Volnay and Meursault: a fourteenth-century château with a run of long vaulted cellars at constant temperature and humidity, which Dominique Lafon and Pierre Meurgey turned that year into what they called Burgundy’s first wine lab (shared sorting tables, presses and staff for a handful of young growers and négociants). Brisset was one of the first in. “With us,” he says, “the mark of the terroir comes before the ego of men.”

J’ai compris que la Bourgogne était « le » Graal.

Pierre Brisset

The only vines he owns are in the Abbaye de Morgeot, the four-hectare lieu-dit at the heart of Chassagne’s largest premier cru, where the Cistercians of Maizières had a grange and the slope faces southeast on Bathonian limestone and clay-gravel, next to La Chapelle, La Vigne Blanche and Les Grands Clos. The vines are forty to fifty years old, planted at ten thousand to the hectare and cropped at thirty hectolitres: six hundred bottles, every year since 2014, the house’s signature white. Tamlyn Currin on the 2022: “the depth of lustrous cream in this wine is knee-buckling, despite spine-tingling torque and a rasp of texture… Stunning.”

The rest is a map of the Côte drawn in small numbers. In white: Saint-Aubin 1er Cru Sous Roche Dumay, seventy-year-old massale vines beside the Murgers des Dents de Chien and En Remilly, nine hundred bottles; Meursault Les Grands Charrons, a village lieu-dit next to Goutte d’Or and Porusot, twelve hundred. In red, the Côte de Nuits: Échezeaux from Les Champs Traversins, just above the Clos de Vougeot, seventy-year vines, three hundred bottles; Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Rouges du Dessus, directly above Échezeaux, nine hundred; Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Cras beside Les Fuées and Bonnes-Mares, three hundred, and Les Noirots, just under Bonnes-Mares, six hundred; Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Thorey on the Vosne side, twelve hundred; Pommard 1er Cru from Charmots and Argillières, nine hundred. And, since 2016, a pair of Bourgognes from vines just outside the Chassagne and Gevrey lines, Cassaneas and Gabrius, the old names of those two villages, made with the same care and a fraction of the price, because he did not want Burgundy to cut itself off from the people who live there.

The farming on the bought parcels is raisonnée, the harvest by hand everywhere, and the winemaking is deliberately classical. “What I look for in a Burgundy is first of all taste, an inimitable taste. That comes through grapes at perfect ripeness. A ripe grape gives round tannins without losing their strength.” Reds are entirely destemmed (égrappage total on every sheet) and spend fourteen months in barrel, with the new wood chosen cru by cru: none on Les Cras, a third on the Pommard and the Vosne, half on Aux Thorey, and nothing stated for the Échezeaux, which is the wine Currin found “sulky and skulking, not even nearly ready to be opened.” Whites are pressed gently, settled overnight, fermented in barrel, raised twelve months in wood and four more in tank, a third new on the Saint-Aubin.

“I like generous Burgundies with depth. In white as in red, I defend the idea of wines raised in barrel with discretion and elegance.” The limestone, he says, is the whole secret, and the bottle, heavy, modern and deliberately luxurious, is the one part of the house that is not discreet at all.

Chez nous la marque des terroirs passe avant l’égo des hommes.

Pierre Brisset

Tamlyn Currin, who tastes Burgundy for JancisRobinson.com, has given the house a run of 17.5s. On the 2022 Aux Thorey: “Just delicious. Hands down, arms wide, head thrown back with joy, sheer deliciousness… The tannins are pure cashmere.” On the 2023 Rouges du Dessus: “There are some wines that instantly buckle my knees and this was one… a wine that you simply don’t want to end.” On the 2023 Les Cras: “a beauty, glowing with crimson fruit… generous, almost luscious Chambolle but the ripeness is beautifully restrained.” On the Saint-Aubin: “Like dipping your tongue in a pile of chalk powder. And then, after the texture, I smell flowers.” Even the Bourgogne Gabrius, 16.5: “a whopping romp of fruit… drink-me-damn-it delicious.”

Bettane & Desseauve, 93 on the 2021 Pommard: “a Pommard of power, well made; the lightly saline finish is full of flavour. A fine bottle.” Gault & Millau, 93 on the 2021 Aux Thorey. The Guide Hachette gave the 2015 Chassagne La Grande Montagne two stars and a coup de cœur, and two stars to the 2022 Abbaye de Morgeot. Antoine Gerbelle on the Grandes Ruchottes: “a complex nose that recalls the premiers crus at Ramonet… flirts with the grands crus.” The French wine press has taken to calling him le dandy des bourgognes, which he seems to enjoy.

The tannins are pure cashmere.

Tamlyn Currin, JancisRobinson.com, on the 2022 Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Thorey