Chambolle to Nuits
Combes, fans and the fault, from Chambolle to the Meuzin.
Eight kilometres of the same east-facing slope, from Chambolle-Musigny down to Nuits-Saint-Georges, cut across by dry valleys. At Chambolle the Combe Ambin splits the hill in two, and the fault along it has left the halves on different rock: crinoidal limestone under Bonnes-Mares and Les Cras on the north side, hard Comblanchien under Musigny on the south. Meltwater at the end of the last ice age poured out of the combe and spread fans of limestone pebbles over the slope below the village. Lower down, Chambolle's village vines and most of the Clos de Vougeot sit on a salmon-pink conglomerate laid down when the Saône rift opened. At Nuits the Meuzin cuts through the town. North of it, toward Vosne, the slope runs from limestone at the top to clay at the bottom, with deeper, clay-rich soil at mid-slope.
The vineyards we pour from show the spread. Digioia-Royer's Les Gruenchers has forty centimetres of stony, chert-filled soil over Prémeaux limestone; his Les Groseilles, a few rows away, is on the old fan at the mouth of the combe. Gérard Mugneret's La Richemone, the steepest ground the domaine farms, has as little as five centimetres of sandy, stony soil. A kilometre south, the Gavignets' Aux Bousselots stands on three or four metres of clay. Across the Meuzin their Les Chaboeufs, in a narrow cool valley toward Prémeaux, is forty centimetres of iron-red clay-limestone, and Philippe Gavignet finds pepper and spice in it every year.
Tap any two to compare them and cut a slice through the slope between them. Échezeaux Les Champs Traversins and the Clos de Vougeot are placed approximately (Digioia-Royer's rows in the Clos are not on record), and so is the Gavignets' La Montagne.
Curve shapes are illustrative; the size of each swing is from published figures.
Soils, depths and planting years from Digioia-Royer, Gérard Mugneret and Philippe Gavignet via our producer pages. Not every depth is published and Aux Bousselots goes down three metres or more, so the pits are drawn to suggest the ground, not to scale; the figure under each pit is the grower's own.
Every producer on this plate
Pick a producer to light up their vineyards and see where each wine comes from.
How the ground is shown: the pins take their colour from the 1:10,000 geological studies where these cover the climat (Chambolle, the Clos de Vougeot) and from the grower's own description elsewhere. Heights and slopes come from the elevation data.
Heights marked as the grower's figure come from our producer notes; others are read off the elevation data at the pin. Soil notes come from the producers' technical sheets.
Sources: elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles (EU-DEM and other public data); cru outlines from INAO open data; lieux-dits from the BIVB's Bourgogne Maps; geology of Chambolle-Musigny and the Clos de Vougeot from Françoise Vannier's 1:10,000 studies for the ODG (ADAMA), as presented by Monocépage; Échezeaux and the Combe d'Orveau from Monocépage; the Nuits slope from Charles Curtis MW's Nuits-Saint-Georges profile in Decanter; parcels, soils and quotations from Digioia-Royer, Gérard Mugneret, Philippe Gavignet and Pierre Brisset via our producer pages, with Jasper Morris MW, Clive Coates MW and the Guide Hachette as quoted there.
On to Savigny, Corton & Beaune · back to Burgundy.