Santenay & Maranges

At Santenay the Côte bends about twenty degrees to the west and comes apart. The village sits where the faults of the Saône rift cross the old Blanzy–Le Creusot coal basin, so the slope is cut into blocks, and a dozen limestones and marls take turns over a few hundred metres. On the Clos Rousseau side the faults run across the slope instead of along it, the most tangled pattern the geologists of ADAMA have mapped on the Côte. The Mont de Sène, the 521 m hill of the Three Crosses, stands over it all to the west. West toward the Maranges the oldest rock on the Côte comes up: Liassic marl and limestone full of Gryphaea, the curled fossil oyster, laid down 170 to 195 million years ago.

David Moreau farms both halves and gives the rock for each parcel. North of the Combe Saint-Jean, Beauregard is at the top of the slope, 310 to 340 m, on marl; Beaurepaire, on a slope steeper than one in five, is on Chassagne limestone; the Clos des Mouches has a few tens of centimetres of soil on the Nantoux limestone slab, on a crest open to the north wind. To the south-west the Clos Rousseau is lean, iron-rich ground on crinoidal limestone. Over the line in Cheilly, his Aux Gryphées comes from Gryphaea limestone at Le Goty and Aux Rouères and from sand washed off the granite Morvan at En Crevèches. Lower down, toward the Dheune, the rock disappears under fans of scree and river silt.

Tap any two to compare them and cut a slice through the slope between them. Premiers crus sit on their INAO outlines and village lieux-dits on the BIVB's map. Aux Rouères is not on the BIVB map and is placed approximately; Les Prarons is split on the map into an upper and a lower half, and its pin is on the upper half, which matches the heights the domaine gives.