Domaine Harmand-Geoffroy Bourgogne Rouge La Nouroy 2020

The Land

Everything separating this wine from a Gevrey-Chambertin is a line drawn on a map. La Nouroy is a quarter-hectare parcel on the eastern, gentler side of the village, sitting right up against ground that carries the village appellation. The soil there is deeper than what you find on the slope above, though still carrying a serious load of stones over the clay and limestone that runs beneath all of Gevrey. It is the only piece of the estate that does not qualify for a village or cru label. Domaine Harmand-Geoffroy farms nine hectares in total, planted entirely to Pinot Noir and lying entirely within the commune of Gevrey-Chambertin — a holding that runs up through Clos Prieur and En Jouise to the premiers crus Les Champeaux, Lavaux Saint-Jacques, La Perrière and the monopole La Bossière, and finally to grand cru Mazis-Chambertin. The same hands work all of it.

The Wine

Pinot Noir from vines past thirty years old, farmed the way the whole domaine is farmed: soils turned by tractor and by hand, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizer, no insecticides, debudding through the season, a green harvest when the crop demands it, and picking by hand. The importer's point about this bottling is that it gets the family method rather than a lesser one — full destemming, a cold maceration running as long as five days, then a cuvaison of fifteen to twenty-one days under temperature control, racking to barrel for malolactic, and roughly sixteen months on fine lees before bottling without filtration. New oak is reserved for the more structured cuvées, so this one arrives clean of it. The 2020 growing season in the Côte d'Or was hot and severely dry, rainfall running about sixty percent below normal, and the harvest came in as one of the earliest on record — ahead even of 2003. Skins were thick and berries held little juice; growers needed ten to fifteen percent more fruit by weight to fill a barrel. That shows here as dark cherry and cassis, iron and crushed stone underneath, real density for the appellation. The domaine asks that its wines be decanted.

The People

The estate was established in the late nineteenth century and is still run by the family whose two names are on the label, with Gérard Harmand and his son Philippe leading it now. They have made a deliberate decision that most Burgundy growers have not: no négociant fruit, no parcels in neighboring villages, no white wine at all. Nine hectares, one grape, one commune. That focus is the argument for buying their Bourgogne Rouge in particular, because there is no second-tier winemaking here to fall back on — the quarter hectare of La Nouroy goes through exactly what Mazis-Chambertin goes through. The parcel yields enough that their American importer sees roughly one hundred cases in a given year.

Food Pairing

Coq au vin is the obvious answer and the right one: the wine's acidity keeps a long-braised sauce from turning heavy. Roast duck with cherries works because the wine's own dark fruit meets the fruit in the pan and its tannin handles the fat under the skin. A mushroom tart, or anything with a serious quantity of chanterelles, plays to the iron-and-earth side of Gevrey. And an Époisses, from twenty minutes up the road, is nearly too much for the wine but not quite — which is the fun of it. Decant it thirty minutes ahead. This is the Tuesday bottle that makes you rethink what Tuesday is for.