There is something almost suspiciously composed about Domaine Chandon de Briailles.

Its house at Savigny-lès-Beaune belongs to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a world of symmetry, proportion and formal gardens. Beneath it lie much older cellars. Around it, the family has accumulated nearly two centuries of continuity since acquiring the property in 1834. As an image of Burgundy as inheritance — architecture, lineage, vineyard and bottle held together across generations — it is difficult to improve upon.

Then walk into the vineyards.

Here, four horses do the work once assigned to tractors. Synthetic treatments disappeared decades ago. Biodynamics became the organising principle. Powdery mildew may be confronted with skimmed milk rather than a conventional fungicide. In the cellar, Pinot Noir can begin fermentation as intact bunches before the vats are emptied, the fruit destemmed and fermentation resumed. New oak is restrained. Sulfur is not an automatic recipe but a decision.

This is not Burgundy preserved in aspic.

Chandon de Briailles complicates the easy distinction between traditional and modern. Much of what it does looks old-fashioned: horses, whole bunches, long élevage, old cellars, patient wines. Yet the reasoning behind those choices is distinctly contemporary. Soil compaction, sap flow, microbial life, gentle extraction and the physiological ripeness of stems belong to a Burgundy that has spent the past two decades questioning interventions once considered routine.

And then came 2024.

It was a vintage that turned philosophy into ordeal. Disease pressure was relentless. Frost and hail compounded the difficulties. Yields collapsed, and Burgundy produced one of its smallest crops of recent years.

At Chandon de Briailles, the consequences reached all the way to Corton.

In a normal vintage, the domaine bottles three red Cortons separately: Les Maréchaudes, Bressandes and Clos du Roi. Their separateness is the point. Burgundy is built on distinctions of slope, soil, exposure, altitude and drainage, sometimes measured over remarkably short distances. Growers preserve those differences; drinkers are trained to search for them.

In 2024, there was not enough wine.

The three Cortons became one.

The resulting cuvée, Trilogie Royale, tells a story before the cork is pulled. Three climats normally defended in their individuality were joined by necessity. For an estate whose reputation rests on sensitivity to place, the decision poses a particularly Burgundian question: what happens to the idea of terroir when the vintage refuses to cooperate?

A family estate that learned to change

The Chandon de Briailles story is usually told through continuity. The estate has remained in the same family since the nineteenth century and is today run by siblings Claude and François de Nicolay. The château, gardens and cellars supply all the historical atmosphere one expects of old Burgundy.

Continuity, however, is only half the story.

The more consequential inheritance may be the family’s willingness to change the way the land is farmed.

A decisive shift began under Nadine de Nicolay in 1989, when synthetic chemical treatments started to disappear from the vineyards. Claude and François later pushed the estate further, beginning conversion to biodynamic viticulture in 2005. Demeter certification followed in 2011.

That chronology matters because biodynamics has become familiar enough in Burgundy to risk becoming part of the scenery. At Chandon de Briailles, it is better understood not as a badge but as an accumulation of practical choices, each of which demands time, labour and conviction.

Since 2016, the estate has removed tractors from cultivation of the vineyard soils. Four horses — Diva, Epi, Farandole and Gipsy — now do that work. Light tracked vehicles are retained where necessary for treatments, but the principle is straightforward: keep heavy machinery off the ground.

The argument is physical before it is philosophical. Repeated tractor passes compact soil. Compaction affects the movement of water and air, root development and the conditions in which soil organisms live. A horse does not solve every viticultural problem, but it places far less pressure on the earth.

It also requires labour.

That is the side of biodynamics less easily reduced to an attractive photograph. Horses need handlers. Vineyard passes take time. Treatments must be prepared and applied. Disease still has to be controlled. For fewer than fourteen hectares, Chandon de Briailles maintains a substantial permanent workforce.

The meaningful question is therefore not whether a horse looks beautiful between Burgundian vines. It is whether this degree of manual farming can be sustained as vintages become more erratic and growing seasons more extreme.

In 2024, the question became acute.

The estate had to intervene in the vineyards far more frequently than in a normal season. That apparent paradox is important. Low-intervention farming does not necessarily mean less work. In a difficult year it can require more observation, more passes through the vineyards and a much narrower margin for error.

The romance of biodynamics tends to centre on preparations, lunar rhythms and horses. Its reality in a year such as 2024 is closer to endurance.

The grand cru that isn’t

For all the prestige of Corton, the vineyard that may explain Chandon de Briailles most clearly sits lower in Burgundy’s official hierarchy.

Pernand-Vergelesses Premier Cru Île des Vergelesses is one of the domaine’s defining holdings. François de Nicolay has called it the family’s cheval de bataille — its workhorse, its standard-bearer.

That is a revealing description from a producer with grand cru Corton in the cellar.

The domaine owns a substantial part of Île des Vergelesses and makes both red and white from the site. Pinot Noir occupies the old red-wine parcels; Chardonnay another portion of the vineyard. It lies in that compelling zone around Pernand-Vergelesses where the hill of Corton begins to assert itself but the labels have not yet acquired grand cru status.

Burgundy encourages us to read its hierarchy vertically: regional, village, premier cru, grand cru. Reality is less orderly.

A great grower can make a village wine more compelling than a mediocre grand cru. Certain premier crus possess exposures, histories and reputations that make their official position seem inadequate to what is actually in the glass. Île des Vergelesses belongs to that category.

At Chandon de Briailles, its importance is reinforced by scale. The family owns enough of the vineyard for it to become not merely another cuvée but part of the estate’s identity. The domaine has even spoken of the site in terms of a kind of “super premier cru.”

The phrase captures one of the tensions at the heart of serious Burgundy drinking. Classification is indispensable; without it, the region becomes almost impossible to understand. Yet the longer one drinks Burgundy, the less sufficient classification seems.

Île des Vergelesses offers Chandon de Briailles something its small grand cru parcels cannot: continuity, repetition and an unusually deep archive of experience. A grower comes to know a vineyard not through prestige but through decades of working it, in heat and rain, abundance and scarcity.

If Corton is Chandon de Briailles at its most exalted, Île des Vergelesses may be the domaine at its most articulate.

Whole bunches, but not dogma

The cellar provides another example of an apparently old method being reconsidered through a modern lens.

Whole-cluster fermentation has become one of contemporary Burgundy’s great stylistic debates. During the decades in which destemming became close to universal, stems were often regarded principally as a source of vegetal flavour or hard tannin. Their return at many ambitious domaines has brought its own vocabulary: perfume, freshness, spice, structure.

At Chandon de Briailles, however, “whole cluster” does not quite describe what happens.

The current approach to the reds begins with intact bunches undergoing several days of intracellular fermentation. The vat is then emptied. The fruit is destemmed, after which juice and solids are returned to continue fermentation. Extraction depends largely on comparatively gentle pumpovers.

It is an unusual sequence: whole bunches first, destemming later.

The reasoning is more experimental than nostalgic. The domaine wants some of what stems can contribute without necessarily accepting everything they contain. François de Nicolay has explained the method in terms of tannin management: the first phase can capture a finer contribution from the stems while avoiding the harder extraction that may develop later in fermentation.

The same pragmatism governs oak. The wines mature predominantly in traditional Burgundian barrels, but the proportion of new wood remains low. Oak is not there to advertise itself.

Sulfur follows a similar logic. The domaine avoids routine additions during vinification, but sulfur-free winemaking is not treated as a purity test. A small addition can be made before bottling if a wine needs protection.

This matters because “natural wine” is often too imprecise a category for estates such as Chandon de Briailles. The domaine shares many practices associated with that movement — biodynamic farming, spontaneous fermentation, low additions, whole bunches — yet its methods are technically detailed and carefully controlled.

The objective is not to do nothing.

It is to intervene deliberately.

The slow whites

The whites apply much the same philosophy to time.

Whole bunches are pressed, and the wines can remain on their lees in larger-format oak vessels for more than two years. Twenty-six or twenty-eight months is a long élevage for white Burgundy, particularly when commercial pressure favours earlier bottling and release.

A second winter in the cellar is not an incidental detail. It ties up vessels, cellar space and capital. The domaine accepts those costs because it believes the wines benefit from developing at their own pace.

That patience helps explain Chandon de Briailles better than the language of modernity or tradition alone. Its changes have rarely been cosmetic. They concern cultivation, extraction, sulfur, vessel size and time.

The château still looks like the château.

The process behind the wine has been repeatedly reconsidered.

What 2024 exposed

This is why 2024 matters beyond the quality of a single vintage.

It placed pressure on the whole philosophy.

Biodynamics is easiest to admire in a dry, balanced growing season. Its real test comes when mildew pressure becomes ferocious, treatments are repeatedly challenged by rain and a grower faces the possibility of losing a substantial part of the crop.

Terroir is easiest to celebrate when each climat produces enough wine to be bottled separately. Its limits become more interesting when three grands crus yield so little that preserving their separate identities no longer makes practical sense.

And low-intervention cellar work is easiest when pristine fruit arrives at the winery. The real test is how rigorously a producer sorts and adapts after months of difficult weather.

Chandon de Briailles did not abandon its principles in 2024. Nor could philosophy cancel the conditions of the year.

That is what makes Trilogie Royale so interesting. It is both concession and statement.

In most wine regions, blending three neighbouring parcels would barely require explanation. In Burgundy, it touches one of the region’s central beliefs. Generations of growers, merchants and drinkers have been trained to care about exactly where a vine stands. An enormous intellectual and commercial structure has grown around the conviction that one climat should taste different from the next.

By combining Bressandes, Clos du Roi and Les Maréchaudes, Chandon de Briailles temporarily set aside one of Burgundy’s most cherished habits.

But perhaps that was the more truthful expression of 2024.

A vintage belongs to terroir too.

A site does not exist independently of rain, temperature, disease and the choices made by the person farming it. A climat is not a museum specimen but an agricultural place, and agriculture occasionally refuses the neatness demanded by labels.

Trilogie Royale may therefore express something broader than any one of its constituent parcels: not simply Corton, but Corton subjected to 2024.

Burgundy without nostalgia

It would be easy to romanticise Chandon de Briailles.

The temptation is everywhere: the château, the formal gardens, the old cellars, the horses moving between rows of vines, a family estate approaching two centuries under the same ownership. Burgundy provides an almost inexhaustible vocabulary for nostalgia.

But nostalgia is not what makes the domaine interesting.

Claude and François de Nicolay inherited an old estate, not an obligation to repeat every old habit. Their achievement has been to distinguish between tradition that carries knowledge and convention that merely carries momentum.

Tractors need not remain in the vineyards simply because they are efficient. Synthetic chemistry need not be used simply because it became normal. Stems need neither be rejected nor worshipped. Sulfur need neither be added reflexively nor excluded ideologically. And a premier cru need not be treated as emotionally secondary to a grand cru simply because the classification says so.

Even the château offers a useful analogy.

A building survives for centuries not because nobody touches it, but because successive generations decide what must be preserved, what must be repaired and what can be changed. A wine estate is no different.

The next generation is beginning to enter that conversation. After the transformations introduced by Claude and François, the question is becoming not simply what they will hand on, but what they expect their successors to question in turn.

The inheritance is obvious in one sense: vineyards in Savigny, Pernand and Corton; old vines; cellars; a remarkable house; bottles carrying one of the Côte de Beaune’s established names.

The harder inheritance is a way of thinking about those things.

That may be what makes Chandon de Briailles feel most contemporary. Its future does not depend on looking modern, nor on discarding the trappings of history to demonstrate relevance. Its modernity lies in refusing to confuse age with authority.

The old house can remain.

The old assumptions do not have to.

When Louis Roederer announced on 24 July that Domaine Pierre Damoy had joined its collection of wine estates, the language was one of heritage, transmission and stewardship.

It suited the occasion. In the year of its 250th anniversary, the independent Champagne house had finally secured its first estate in Burgundy — and not just any estate.

Domaine Pierre Damoy possesses close to eight hectares of Grand Cru vines, principally in Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, Chambertin and Chapelle-Chambertin, as well as Clos Tamisot, its monopole in Gevrey-Chambertin. Roederer described the acquisition as the recognition of an exceptional vineyard heritage requiring a long-term vision.

For Burgundy lovers, the names require little embellishment. Damoy is particularly important in Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, where its holdings make it one of the climat’s defining proprietors.

Yet within weeks of Roederer’s announcement, another dimension to the transaction emerged.

According to reporting by Laurent Gotti in La Revue du Vin de France, intervention by the French authorities meant that Roederer could not simply take over the vineyard operation without compensatory measures. Burgundy’s growers had sought the release of part of Domaine Damoy, while additional vineyard land was reportedly to be relinquished elsewhere in France.

The acquisition has therefore become more than the story of a great Champagne house entering Burgundy.

It is an early and unusually visible test of France’s attempt to regulate agricultural concentration when control of vineyards changes through companies rather than through a straightforward sale of land.

A law aimed at the shares

The legislation at the centre of the affair is generally known as the Sempastous law, adopted in December 2021.

France already possessed an extensive system for regulating agricultural land. Wine drinkers familiar with Burgundy will probably have encountered the name SAFER, the regional rural land agencies that can intervene in certain property transactions.

But agricultural land does not always change control through a conventional sale.

Vineyards may be held or farmed by companies. Instead of selling the land itself, owners can transfer shares in the company that controls it.

The soil stays where it is. Control above it changes.

The Sempastous mechanism was designed to address precisely that situation. Transactions resulting in the acquisition or strengthening of control over agricultural companies can require prior authorisation when the land concerned, including holdings controlled directly or indirectly, exceeds regional concentration thresholds. SAFER examines the transaction; the final administrative decision belongs to the prefect.

Crucially, the outcome need not be simply approval or refusal.

Compensatory measures can be proposed to address the additional concentration created by a transaction. Land may, for example, be sold or made available under long-term agricultural leases to help another farmer establish or strengthen a viable operation.

For Burgundy, where access to vines has become one of the greatest obstacles facing younger growers, the implications are considerable.

Roederer was already inside the door

The corporate history of Domaine Pierre Damoy makes the transaction particularly suited to this new system.

Roederer’s involvement did not begin with the public announcement of exclusive negotiations in April 2026.

Corporate notices show that shares in the SCEV Domaine Pierre Damoy had already been transferred to Champagne Louis Roederer with effect from 31 January 2025, and Roederer subsequently appeared officially as an associate of the company.

In other words, Roederer’s arrival was a process rather than a single transaction announced to the world one summer afternoon.

That distinction matters. The Sempastous law was created precisely because looking only for a vineyard changing hands before a notaire no longer captures all the ways in which control over French agricultural land can move from one owner to another.

Scale matters too.

Roederer remains an independent family company rather than a listed luxury conglomerate, and its expansion has largely been presented in terms of long-term ownership of vineyards and estates. But the wider group now represents well over 1,000 hectares of vines in France and abroad.

The Damoy affair is therefore not easily reduced to a familiar argument between a family domaine and outside corporate capital.

It is family ownership at one scale meeting family ownership at another.

What Burgundy wanted back

The Confédération des Appellations et des Vignerons de Bourgogne, or CAVB, pushed for part of the Damoy vineyard to be released.

Its president, Thiébault Huber, told La Revue du Vin de France that the organisation initially sought roughly one quarter of the domaine, including a small amount of Grand Cru land.

The final arrangement he described was different.

According to Huber, all of the domaine’s vines in village appellations — around three hectares — are to be made available for rental under SAFER supervision. He stressed that the CAVB was not seeking to prevent groups or wealthy families from investing in Burgundy, but rather to find a balance when acquisitions increase vineyard concentration.

Huber also said Roederer would relinquish four hectares in Champagne, around ten hectares in Bordeaux and a smaller amount in Bandol.

At the time of writing, Gallico Vinum had not located a published prefectural order setting out those Damoy commitments in the detail available for some other Sempastous cases. The precise acreage of the compensation package should therefore, for now, be understood as Huber’s reported account of the agreement rather than as figures independently confirmed from the final administrative order.

But there is good evidence that the underlying principle — including compensation far beyond Burgundy — is already being applied elsewhere.

A precedent in plain sight

Only weeks before completion of the Damoy acquisition, the Côte-d’Or prefecture published a revealing decision involving another wine group.

On 18 June 2026, it authorised the takeover of the SCEA Guy et Yvan Dufouleur by ARVITIS, controlled by Champagne businessman Alain Thiénot.

The prefecture calculated that, following the transaction, Thiénot would directly or indirectly control or exploit 584.5 hectares of agricultural land, corresponding to a much larger figure after the weighting system used by the regulations was applied.

Approval was conditional on compensatory measures.

They included a long-term lease of just over one hectare of Côte-d’Or vines to a grower establishing herself, the sale of 1.75 hectares of vineyard land to SAFER Bourgogne-Franche-Comté — and the sale of 6.03 hectares of vines in the Gironde to SAFER Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

That precedent is important.

It shows that asking a wine group to release Bordeaux land as part of the regulatory response to a Burgundy acquisition is not an eccentric feature of the Damoy negotiations. A system is beginning to take shape in which the authorities look at agricultural concentration across a wider collection of assets rather than treating every domaine as an entirely separate world.

To the wine drinker, a hectare in Bordeaux, Champagne and Gevrey-Chambertin belongs to three distinct cultures, markets and appellation systems.

To French land policy, they can also form part of the same question: how much agricultural land ultimately sits under one sphere of control?

The Grands Crus remain

The Damoy compromise nevertheless contains an obvious tension.

The domaine has close to eight hectares of Grand Cru vineyard. Roederer’s announcement naturally emphasised Chambertin, Chambertin-Clos de Bèze and Chapelle-Chambertin — the assets that make Domaine Damoy such an exceptional acquisition.

The CAVB, according to Huber, had sought the release of a small amount of Grand Cru.

What it appears to have obtained instead is approximately three hectares of village-level vines.

If the purpose of the system is to broaden access to agricultural land, what exactly has been achieved by releasing three hectares of village Gevrey while the Grand Cru holdings remain intact?

The answer should not be dismissed.

Three hectares in Gevrey-Chambertin could transform the prospects of an independent grower. In a region where estates can be assembled row by row and where available vineyard land is extraordinarily scarce, that is a substantial area.

But equal surface area does not mean equivalent land in Burgundy.

Three hectares of village vineyard and even a fraction of Chambertin-Clos de Bèze differ enormously in value, rarity and strategic importance. If compensation is drawn principally from less prestigious land, the Sempastous mechanism can improve access to Burgundy while leaving control of its rarest terroirs largely untouched.

That may be a perfectly defensible compromise.

But it is worth understanding what kind of compromise it is.

Good stewardship is only part of the question

None of this necessarily implies that Roederer is the wrong owner for Domaine Pierre Damoy.

A well-capitalised, independent company able to invest over decades can offer obvious advantages to an estate built around old vines in some of the Côte de Nuits’ greatest vineyards. Roederer has explicitly framed the acquisition around preserving the domaine’s identity and vineyard heritage.

The more interesting question is whether good stewardship alone resolves Burgundy’s concern about concentration.

The region’s character has always been inseparable from fragmented ownership. A single climat can be divided among numerous domaines; neighbouring growers farming adjacent rows can produce markedly different wines. Inheritance, métayage, négociant relationships and small holdings have produced plenty of complications, but they have also helped create Burgundy’s extraordinary diversity.

Outside investment does not automatically diminish that culture, and larger ownership does not automatically erase terroir.

Yet consolidation has a quality of permanence. Once rare vineyard parcels enter the portfolios of owners with the resources to hold them indefinitely, they are unlikely to return quickly to the market.

The significance of the Sempastous law is that France has begun to insert a counterweight into that process.

Roederer still acquires Domaine Pierre Damoy. The Grand Cru vineyards remain at the heart of the estate. But other land may be released, giving growers elsewhere an opportunity to establish or expand.

The next test will be what happens to those hectares.

Who receives the three hectares reportedly being made available in Burgundy, and on what terms? And if similar cases arise in the future, will the regulatory system ever result in Premier Cru or Grand Cru land itself being released?

Those questions matter beyond Domaine Damoy.

Roederer’s purchase may ultimately be remembered as the moment one of Champagne’s great houses finally secured a place in Burgundy. But it may also come to be seen as part of a more consequential change: France deciding that acquiring an exceptional vineyard can create obligations extending beyond buyer and seller.

The vines of Chambertin-Clos de Bèze may have a new steward.

France, meanwhile, has made clear that it intends to keep watching who gets the keys.

There are vineyards in Burgundy that announce themselves with walls, gates or a famous name discreetly carved into stone. Domaine Leroy announces itself rather differently.

Look across certain parcels of the Côte de Nuits in summer and the boundary can become visible before one knows exactly where it lies. Many neighbouring vines have been clipped into the familiar green rectangles of Burgundian viticulture, their growing tips removed as the season advances. Leroy’s can appear taller, looser and almost defiantly unkempt, their shoots continuing upwards before being bent, rolled or woven across the top of the trellis.

For Lalou Bize-Leroy, this is not untidiness. It is an argument.

Asked in 2023 about the conventional practice of summer hedging, or rognage, she answered with a characteristically memorable objection: “nous ne sommes pas chez le coiffeur” — we are not at the hairdresser.

Behind the joke lies a serious question. What happens when a grower rejects one of viticulture’s most routine gestures? And what happens when an approach once regarded as eccentric is subsequently adopted, adapted or investigated by some of Burgundy’s most ambitious growers — only for the region’s own research to suggest that its effects are considerably more complicated than either admirers or sceptics might wish?

This is not simply a story about biodynamics, nor quite a story about tressage, the increasingly conspicuous practice of retaining and weaving uncut vine shoots.

It is about the consequences of looking at a vine not as a production unit, but as an individual plant.

An individual, not a production unit

The Leroy family’s wine business is much older. Maison Leroy was founded in the nineteenth century. But the modern story of Domaine Leroy begins in 1988, when Lalou Bize-Leroy acquired substantial holdings from the Charles Noëllat estate in Vosne-Romanée.

The transaction brought extraordinary terroirs: Romanée-Saint-Vivant, Richebourg, Clos de Vougeot, Vosne-Romanée Les Beaux Monts, Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Boudots and others. The acquisition of the Philippe-Rémy estate the following year added further grands crus, including Chambertin, Latricières-Chambertin and Clos de la Roche.

Yet prestige alone does not explain what followed.

The Noëllat vineyards included old vines and valuable Pinot Noir material propagated by massal selection. Rather than treating elderly plants as inefficient units to be replaced when their productivity declined, Leroy set about preserving them wherever possible. Dead vines were replaced individually. New plants could be propagated from the domaine’s own material. The goal was not a perfectly uniform vineyard but continuity.

That helps explain much else about Domaine Leroy.

The tiny yields for which it became famous are one expression of the same thinking. So is severe debudding. So is the attention paid to pruning and vine longevity. And so, eventually, is the refusal to cut off a healthy growing tip simply because vineyard convention expects a row of Pinot Noir to stop at a convenient height.

Leroy was also an extraordinarily early convert to biodynamic viticulture, although she was not Burgundy’s first. Jean-Claude Rateau had begun experimenting with biodynamics in Beaune in 1979. What Leroy brought was something different: visibility.

From 1988 onwards, biodynamic ideas were being applied without apology to some of Burgundy’s most scrutinised vineyards. Richebourg and Romanée-Saint-Vivant are difficult places in which to conduct an agricultural experiment unnoticed.

That experiment did not proceed without failure.

The mildew-ravaged 1993 vintage hit Domaine Leroy brutally. Production collapsed in some parcels, and the episode provided ammunition for neighbours already sceptical of the domaine’s methods. Later accounts indicate that spraying problems contributed to the severity of the losses.

The significance of 1993 is easily missed. Leroy’s viticulture has sometimes been absorbed into a romantic story of “natural” or hands-off farming. In practice, it demands almost the opposite: constant observation and enormous quantities of human labour. Biodynamic preparations coexist with permitted sulfur and copper treatments, careful disease management, debudding, individual vine replacement and painstaking pruning.

The philosophy is not really one of non-intervention. It is closer to a refusal to dominate the plant unnecessarily.

And that distinction matters when one arrives at the haircut.

Leroy herself dates her rejection of hedging to 1988. Contemporary evidence, however, suggests that systematic non-hedging became conspicuous around 1999 or the 2000 vintage. The apparent discrepancy may reflect a difference between the beginning of a conviction and its eventual application across the domaine, but without clarification from Leroy that remains an inference.

By the turn of the millennium, however, the visual result was unmistakable.

Instead of repeatedly removing the apex, shoots were allowed to lengthen before being bent, rolled or woven. In its modern form, this family of techniques is generally known as tressage.

The vine had stopped submitting to the haircut.

It had not, however, stopped being cut.

Winter pruning at Leroy is treated with enormous seriousness. The domaine has worked with Marco Simonit, whose pruning philosophy emphasises sap flow, restrained cuts and the preservation of permanent vine structure.

That apparent contradiction is revealing. The question is not whether to cut a vine, but why, where and with what consequence. A winter cut intended to preserve a plant for decades belongs to a different category, in this thinking, from repeatedly removing the active growing tip for convenience during summer.

If an old vine is valuable as an individual, one prunes differently. One replants differently. One manages its crop differently.

Eventually, one starts asking why a vineyard should look neat at all.

When the unruly vineyard became influential

Tressage was not invented at Domaine Leroy, and it would be difficult to establish a simple genealogy for its modern revival. Growers outside Burgundy were experimenting with comparable methods around the same period, while individual-stake training and tall vine systems have much older histories.

What Leroy unquestionably supplied was an extraordinarily visible example.

The clearest direct line runs to Charles Lachaux of Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux. Lachaux has acknowledged Bize-Leroy as an important mentor, and his own vineyards became famous for extremely high vegetation, arched shoots and a rejection of conventional hedging.

Elsewhere, Dugat-Py experimented with tressage in Mazis-Chambertin before applying it more widely. Olivier Lamy has explored unusually tall canopies. Jean-Marc Vincent has employed related ideas. Jean-Yves Bizot also avoids conventional hedging, although his system of individually staked vines is technically distinct.

They are not all Leroy disciples, and the distinction matters.

Ideas in Burgundy rarely move in a straight line from master to follower. They travel through observation, argument, visits between vineyards and simultaneous experiments with similar problems. There are even suggestions that some influence travelled back towards Leroy: accounts of Lachaux’s work with very tall supports and Simonit’s involvement at Domaine Leroy complicate any tidy story in which one visionary invents a method and the next generation simply copies it.

The more interesting legacy is cultural.

Leroy helped legitimise the act of questioning vineyard practices so routine that they had almost ceased to look like choices.

Why hedge at this particular height?

Why remove the apex?

Why replace an ageing block wholesale rather than vine by vine?

Why should every plant in a parcel be treated identically?

And why should a well-kept vineyard necessarily be a neat one?

For a time, such questions could be discussed primarily as matters of vine health, terroir expression or philosophy.

Then Burgundy became warmer.

Burgundy puts the idea to the test

Earlier budbreak, advancing harvest dates, drought, heatwaves and the difficulty of achieving physiological maturity without excessive sugar have changed the context in which canopy management is discussed.

Against that background, the attractions of a tall, unhedged vine appear obvious.

More vegetation might provide more shade. Preserving the growing apex can reduce the plant’s tendency to push lateral shoots. A larger functional canopy might, advocates suggest, allow flavours and tannins to develop without sugars racing ahead.

It is an appealing proposition.

Burgundy has now tested it.

Between 2022 and 2025, the Bourgogne Wine Board investigated a series of climate-adaptation strategies through its STRATAGÈME programme. Tressage was one of the vineyard practices examined.

The results are important precisely because they refuse to tell the story many people expected.

In trial parcels in the Yonne and Côte-d’Or, tressed vines tended to experience greater water stress, apparently because the larger leaf surface transpired more water. At harvest, the tressed fruit contained roughly 3.6 to 11 per cent more sugar than the controls in the reported examples. Potential alcohol rose. Total acidity tended to fall.

In one trial, potential alcohol was approximately 12 per cent in the conventionally managed vines and 13.3 per cent in the tressed ones.

That is not a trivial difference. More importantly, it runs in almost the opposite direction from the commonly repeated argument that tressage should help a warming Burgundy restrain sugar accumulation.

Nor did the experiments establish a simple cooling benefit from the additional vegetation. In vintages with strong fungal-disease pressure, denser canopies could make aeration and spray penetration more difficult.

There is also a less romantic constraint: money.

Adapting an existing vineyard for tressage can require expensive changes to trellising, and the BIVB estimated dozens of additional hours of work per hectare. Those economics look very different in a grand cru selling for extraordinary sums from those of a regional Burgundy.

That matters whenever Leroy is described as a blueprint.

A technique practised in Richebourg is not automatically a practical solution for the Côte d’Or as a whole.

And yet the scientific results do not close the case.

They make it more interesting.

When the numbers and the wine disagree

At Domaine Eleni et Édouard Vocoret in Chablis, a tressage experiment begun in 2022 produced results broadly consistent with the wider BIVB work. The tressed vines ripened faster and accumulated more sugar.

One response would have been to abandon the experiment.

Édouard Vocoret did not.

He preferred the wine.

His practical answer to the faster ripening was disarmingly simple: harvest the tressed section earlier. If the desired balance arrived five or seven days before the conventionally hedged vines, there was no requirement to pick both on the same date merely for the convenience of an experiment.

That observation changes the nature of the question.

Perhaps tressage should not be judged principally by asking whether two sets of vines contain the same amount of sugar on an arbitrarily shared harvest date.

Perhaps the more interesting questions are whether preserving the apex changes the plant’s developmental rhythm, whether the grower can exploit that change by choosing a different picking date, and what happens to the wine as a result.

There is physiological logic behind at least part of Leroy’s intuition. Removing the growing tip interrupts apical dominance and can stimulate lateral growth. Research elsewhere has shown that wrapping or retaining shoots can substantially reduce lateral shoot development compared with conventional hedging.

But that does not prove every claim subsequently attached to the practice.

There is no compelling evidence that non-hedging must produce deeper roots, that it will universally reduce sugar, that it necessarily improves drought tolerance or that it guarantees more balanced wine.

That distinction is crucial.

Lalou Bize-Leroy’s importance does not depend upon every one of her intuitions eventually being validated by viticultural science.

If anything, the opposite is more revealing.

She made Burgundy examine assumptions.

And wine itself ensures that those assumptions can never be tested one variable at a time. Nobody tasting a bottle of Leroy Romanée-Saint-Vivant or Richebourg can isolate the flavour of an uncut apex. The wine is the result of an entire system: old vines, genetic material, pruning, yields, soils, farming, harvest decisions, whole bunches, élevage and innumerable choices made during a season.

Tressage is not a tasting note.

It is one element in an agricultural philosophy whose consequences ultimately have to be judged in the glass, even when the glass cannot tell us precisely which decision produced what.

That is why Vocoret’s response is so useful. The laboratory produced one answer. The vigneron tasted another question.

The real Leroy blueprint

Domaine Leroy is therefore a blueprint only if one understands the word loosely.

It is not a recipe.

Few domaines could economically reproduce Leroy’s yields or labour requirements. High, tressed canopies will not necessarily behave identically in Chablis and Vosne-Romanée, on shallow limestone and deeper clay, in a wet year and a drought year. What benefits one parcel may be useless in another.

And copying the visible signs of a philosophy is much easier than reproducing its reasoning.

Yet Leroy has provided modern Burgundy with something more durable than a vineyard technique.

She demonstrated that habitual practice could be interrogated.

That may sound unremarkable now, when Burgundy contains a generation of growers willing to reconsider pruning architecture, planting material, soil cultivation, canopy height, harvest date and vine density. It was less obvious when many of these questions first began to appear in Leroy’s vineyards.

Climate change has made the habit of questioning still more necessary. A practice adapted to Burgundy’s twentieth-century climate cannot claim permanent authority merely because it is traditional. But neither should an unconventional practice become a new orthodoxy simply because its most famous practitioner makes extraordinary wine.

The recent research into tressage is valuable for precisely that reason.

It does not show that Lalou Bize-Leroy was right.

It does not show that she was wrong.

It shows that a question she made unusually visible remains worth asking.

Return, then, to the Côte de Nuits in summer.

The neighbouring vines may still look neater. And neatness carries its own quiet moral judgment: the straight row, the clean line, the disciplined wall of foliage suggest a vineyard properly kept.

Leroy inverted that judgment.

In her vineyards, the apparently unruly vine may have received more individual attention, not less. Its age may have been preserved more stubbornly. Its pruning may have been considered cut by cut. Its crop may have been adjusted vine by vine. Its growing tip may remain not because nobody has bothered to remove it, but because somebody has decided very deliberately not to.

That is the more interesting meaning of the Leroy vineyard.

The domaine’s most consequential contribution to contemporary Burgundy may not be biodynamics, tiny yields or tressage itself. It may simply be the permission to ask whether an apparently obvious gesture benefits the vine — or merely the person accustomed to making it.

More than three decades after Lalou Bize-Leroy began remaking the vineyards under her control, Burgundy is still arguing about the answer.

And in those conspicuously untrimmed rows, the vines continue to make the opening statement.

They are still refusing the haircut.

In 1969, roughly five hectares of vineyard in Pomerol changed hands.

The land did not move. The clay beneath it did not change. The vines continued to grow where they had grown before. Rain fell on the same slopes, roots explored the same soil, and the contours of the plateau remained exactly as they had been.

What changed was a boundary.

The land had belonged to Château Gazin. It was acquired by Petrus.

Before the transaction, Petrus covered only about 6.5 hectares. Afterwards, it occupied approximately 11.5 hectares, close to the size of the estate today. Nearly half of the modern vineyard, in other words, was once not Petrus at all.

It was Gazin.

For an estate whose reputation is so often explained through the uniqueness of its terroir, this is an awkwardly interesting fact.

Petrus is usually imagined as something indivisible: a small vineyard on the Pomerol plateau, planted to Merlot, resting on its celebrated clay. The explanation has become almost circular. Petrus is Petrus because of the place, and the place is special because it produces Petrus.

But the vineyard has not always had its present boundaries. Nor has it always had its present grape composition. What we now regard as one of the most immutable identities in wine was assembled over time.

The five hectares bought from Gazin offer a way into that history—and into a more difficult question about what terroir actually means.

A smaller Petrus

It is easy to read the history of a famous wine backwards.

Because Petrus now occupies an almost unassailable position in the hierarchy of Bordeaux, its rise can look inevitable. It was not.

Pomerol had no 1855 Classification to formalise status. Its estates lacked the architectural theatre of many Médoc châteaux, and Petrus itself had neither a monumental château nor a centuries-old official ranking to support its reputation.

Its documentary history is also less tidy than popular accounts sometimes imply. Eighteenth-century dates are often given for the origins of the estate, but the record becomes firmer in the nineteenth century. By 1868, when Cocks & Féret described the wines of Bordeaux, Petrus was already highly regarded in Pomerol, though Vieux Château Certan and Trotanoy were placed ahead of it.

The vineyard itself would have looked unfamiliar to a modern visitor.

Around 1949, Petrus comprised approximately 6.5 hectares planted to roughly 70 per cent Merlot and 30 per cent Cabernet Franc. The Cabernet Franc was gradually removed, eventually leaving the all-Merlot vineyard associated with the estate today.

That alone complicates the idea of Petrus as a terroir preserved unchanged through history. The grape mix changed substantially. The vineyard later changed size just as dramatically.

Its identity nevertheless became stronger.

Marie-Louise Loubat was central to that transformation. She began acquiring interests in Petrus during the 1920s and eventually took control of the estate. Jean-Pierre Moueix, whose business was becoming increasingly important in the wines of Libourne, subsequently distributed Petrus and became closely involved in its ownership and direction.

Together, the Loubat and Moueix eras helped elevate an excellent Pomerol into an international reference point.

Then, in 1969, the physical definition of Petrus changed.

The Gazin purchase

The land acquired from Château Gazin directly adjoined Petrus.

On a cadastral plan the transaction amounted to little more than the movement of a line. In wine, however, such lines can have extraordinary consequences.

A property boundary may separate two reputations, two prices and two ideas of quality even when the underlying geology continues uninterrupted beneath it.

That was now the situation between Petrus and Gazin.

Before the sale, grapes from the transferred parcels belonged to Gazin. Afterwards, they could contribute to Petrus.

The obvious question was whether a vineyard that had almost doubled in size could maintain the quality of the smaller estate.

The British wine writer David Peppercorn later raised this with Jean-Pierre Moueix. According to the account that survives, Moueix said the original Petrus parcels and the newly acquired Gazin land had initially been vinified separately. The wines from the different sections could therefore be compared.

Moueix’s conclusion was striking: the vats from the newly acquired parcels, he maintained, never came last.

It is one of those details that seems to demand an entire article.

It also needs to be handled cautiously.

The story is not a controlled experiment. There is no publicly available sequence of blind-tasting records allowing the relative performance of each parcel to be reconstructed. Moueix had an obvious interest in believing that the acquisition had strengthened rather than diluted Petrus.

Yet the anecdote matters because of the question it raises.

If the former Gazin parcels were immediately capable of producing wine judged comparable with that from the historic Petrus vineyard, then estate identity could not have depended only on the name attached to the land.

The physical site must have mattered.

And that leads inevitably to the clay.

What the clay actually does

Petrus is routinely reduced to two words: blue clay.

The shorthand is useful, but it can obscure more than it explains.

The soils at Petrus contain significant smectitic clay. Smectites have unusual physical properties: they can expand when wet, contract when dry and retain substantial quantities of water.

For the vine, the consequences are more important than the colour of the soil.

Water availability influences vigour, rooting behaviour, berry development and the timing and severity of hydric stress. Merlot in particular can respond strongly to excessive drought. A soil capable of buffering fluctuations in water supply can therefore shape the way the vine experiences the growing season.

Olivier Berrouet, who directs winemaking at Petrus, has spoken of the estate’s clay in these functional terms. Its importance is not that minerals somehow travel directly from the ground into the flavour of the finished wine. It is that the physical characteristics of the soil influence the plant.

That distinction is central to any serious discussion of terroir.

Research in Bordeaux has repeatedly pointed towards soil texture, structure, porosity, permeability, drainage, rooting and water relations as important mechanisms through which sites affect vine behaviour.

The soil does not need to taste of anything to shape the wine.

But there is a complication.

Gazin has smectite clay too.

The estate describes blue and green clays, iron oxides and smectites in its own vineyard, also on the upper Pomerol terrace. It similarly links those soils to the regulation of water available to the vine.

That does not mean Gazin and Petrus are geologically identical.

Two neighbouring parcels can share the same broad soil category while differing significantly in the depth of the clay, its proportion, structure, relationship with gravel or sand, local drainage and the pattern of vine rooting through the profile.

“Smectite” is therefore not an adequate explanation of Petrus by itself.

The more interesting question is one of distribution.

How closely did the five hectares acquired in 1969 resemble the original 6.5 hectares of Petrus beneath the surface?

If they formed part of essentially the same geological unit, the transaction would suggest that the physical terroir associated with Petrus extended beyond the historic estate boundary.

If their soil profiles were meaningfully different, their successful integration would point in another direction: towards the ability of viticulture, selection and winemaking to create coherence from parcels that are not entirely homogeneous.

The publicly available evidence does not allow that question to be settled neatly.

That is precisely why the 1969 purchase deserves more attention.

The limits of the map

Wine depends on boundaries that nature did not draw.

Appellations, properties, lieux-dits, crus and classifications convert landscapes into named units. They are necessary. Without them, there could be no meaningful concept of a vineyard estate.

But geology rarely respects cadastral convenience.

A clay formation may continue beneath a wall. Water does not alter its movement because a parcel has changed ownership. Roots are indifferent to labels.

Pomerol makes this particularly visible because there is no formal classification separating its great estates. One can pass from one celebrated property towards another without encountering a geological frontier announcing that the market value of the grapes has changed.

The 1969 transaction therefore exposes the uneasy relationship between physical and human terroir.

Ownership mattered. Once Petrus bought the land, the parcels became part of the estate.

But ownership cannot be the whole explanation. Purchasing just any five hectares in Pomerol would not necessarily allow them to disappear successfully into Petrus.

Geology matters too, but geology alone is equally insufficient. Related soil types extend beyond individual properties, while the hierarchy of wine prices certainly does not follow a soil map with scientific precision.

Between the two lie viticulture and selection: planting material, vine age, yields, canopy management, replacement decisions, harvest timing and the decision over which lots finally belong in the wine.

Then comes vinification, blending and, over many vintages, the accumulated sensory expectation attached to the name Petrus.

Terroir viewed in this way is not merely a geological possession.

It is a place interpreted repeatedly.

When climate changes the value of clay

The question is becoming more relevant as Bordeaux warms.

In discussing the hot, dry 2025 vintage, Olivier Berrouet suggested that such conditions might increasingly resemble a “new normal”. Petrus produced very small berries and low yields, while the estate’s clay helped the vines continue functioning through prolonged dry conditions.

The soil did not eliminate drought. It altered the way the vines experienced it.

The response in the cellar was equally revealing. With naturally concentrated fruit, Berrouet reduced extraction rather than increasing it, using fewer pumpovers and a shorter maceration.

That relationship matters.

A soil does not produce the same effect irrespective of vintage. The value of water-retentive clay in a cool, wet season is not identical to its value during prolonged heat and drought.

The geology may be ancient, but its viticultural significance is dynamic.

In a warmer Pomerol, the physical characteristics that helped establish the reputation of Petrus may become more consequential still.

When did the land become Petrus?

Legally, the answer is easy.

The five hectares became part of Petrus when ownership changed.

Everything else is less certain.

The soil did not become different in 1969. Nor did the vines understand that the grapes they produced would henceforth belong to another estate.

What changed immediately was the human definition of the place.

What followed was slower.

The parcels entered the viticulture of Petrus. Their fruit entered its selections. Their wines entered its blends. Vintage after vintage, any distinction between “old Petrus” and the land bought from Gazin became less important.

Eventually, the earlier boundary disappeared from the way the vineyard was understood.

Today, Petrus seems whole.

That apparent wholeness is what makes the history so revealing.

We often imagine great vineyards as natural objects awaiting discovery, their boundaries somehow validated by the quality of the wine they produce. The five hectares bought from Gazin suggest something more complicated.

The geology is real.

So are differences in water relations, rooting and vine behaviour.

But the estate through which we interpret that geology is also historical: shaped by purchases, planting decisions, cultivation, selection, reputation and time.

Perhaps the most interesting question is therefore not why Gazin land was able to become Petrus.

It is whether calling it “Gazin land” and “Petrus land” ever described the physical landscape as neatly as we assumed.

In 1969, the map changed in a day.

Understanding what lay beneath the line is harder.

Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises is routinely described as a relic of pre-phylloxera Champagne. The reality is more complicated — and considerably more interesting.

The easiest way to misunderstand Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises is to ask a seemingly simple question:

How old are the vines?

The wine comes from just two tiny clos in Aÿ, Clos Saint-Jacques and Les Chaudes Terres. Together they amount to only 31 ares, or 0.31 hectare. Both are planted to Pinot Noir. Both are ungrafted. The vines grow en foule, in the dense, irregular arrangement associated with an older form of Champagne viticulture rather than the clean, tractor-friendly rows of the modern vineyard. They are worked by hand, with a draught horse used in the plots, and replacement vines are created through provignage, the old practice of layering a living shoot into the soil until it establishes roots of its own.

Production is minute. The 2016 vintage yielded just 1,736 numbered bottles.

Everything about Vieilles Vignes Françaises encourages mythology.

And the most persistent part of that mythology concerns phylloxera.

Bollinger describes Clos Saint-Jacques and Les Chaudes Terres as vineyards that escaped the insect that devastated European viticulture from the late nineteenth century onwards. The natural inference is seductive: if the plots survived phylloxera, then the vines standing there today must themselves be pre-phylloxera survivors.

That conclusion is much harder to sustain.

A detailed 2026 report by William Kelley states that the present vines were replanted during the 1970s using massal selections from Aÿ, while remaining on their own roots.

At first glance, the two accounts appear contradictory.

They need not be.

They may simply be describing different forms of survival.

And that distinction is where the real story of Vieilles Vignes Françaises begins.

Five different kinds of survival

Wine writing often collapses several different ideas into the phrase “pre-phylloxera vines”.

A vineyard site can be old.

Its method of cultivation can be old.

Its vines can remain ungrafted.

Its genetic material can be propagated from an established local population.

And an individual plant can itself be old enough to pre-date phylloxera.

Those things are related, but they are not interchangeable.

A vineyard does not cease to be historic because its vines have been replanted. Burgundy makes that obvious. No one would argue that a climat loses its historical identity because a parcel has been renewed. The cadastral place, its exposure, soils, boundaries and reputation persist through successive generations of vines.

The same principle applies in Aÿ.

Clos Saint-Jacques and Les Chaudes Terres can preserve a viticultural continuity extending back beyond the phylloxera era without every present vine needing to date from the nineteenth century.

Equally, an ungrafted vine is not necessarily an ancient vine.

That distinction matters because the two ideas are psychologically difficult to separate. Across most European vineyards today, the grape-producing Vitis vinifera plant is grafted onto American-derived rootstock selected in part for resistance to phylloxera. An ungrafted Pinot Noir vine remains on its own roots.

But that tells us something about its root system, not its date of birth.

An ungrafted vine planted in 1975 is still ungrafted.

It can also have been propagated from old local material. It can belong to a diverse massal population rather than a single commercial clone. It may represent a biological inheritance of considerable interest.

None of those things makes it a vine planted in 1875.

So the most useful question to ask about Vieilles Vignes Françaises is not simply whether its present vines are “pre-phylloxera”.

It is this:

What, exactly, has been transmitted?

The importance of lineage

If the present plants were indeed established in the 1970s using massal selections from Aÿ, as Kelley reports, then at least part of the continuity of the vineyard may reside in lineage rather than literal age.

Massal selection is fundamentally different from the idea of preserving one immortal plant.

Instead of propagating a single clone, growers select material from a population of vines judged worthy of reproduction. The resulting vineyard can preserve variation within that population from one generation to the next.

This is not biological immortality.

It is inheritance.

That difference may sound pedantic until one considers how often the identity of an old vineyard is reduced to a planting date. A parcel described as “planted in 1920” sounds immediately more compelling than one planted in 1970.

Yet age alone does not tell us what material was planted, where it came from, how it was propagated or how faithfully a vineyard population has been maintained through time.

At Vieilles Vignes Françaises, those questions may be more illuminating than the number on a birth certificate.

And they become more complicated still because the vineyards are maintained through provignage.

A vineyard without a single birthday

Provignage is one of the keys to understanding why conventional ideas of vine age fit these vineyards so awkwardly.

Rather than removing a failing vine and replacing it with a standard nursery plant, a grower bends a shoot from an existing vine into the soil. Part of the shoot is buried while remaining attached to the parent plant. It develops its own roots and eventually becomes an independent vine.

The new plant is younger.

Yet it is also, in a direct sense, a continuation of the older one.

Practised repeatedly, provignage produces a vineyard population in which generations overlap. Vines die. Others emerge from living neighbours. Renewal happens gradually rather than through the wholesale uprooting and replanting of an entire block.

That makes the familiar shorthand “planted in year X” increasingly inadequate.

A vineyard maintained in this way does not have one simple birthday.

It has a genealogy.

That is the more interesting meaning of old vines at Vieilles Vignes Françaises.

The vineyard begins to resemble a living population rather than a collection of individual antiques.

One might even think of it as a viticultural version of the Ship of Theseus. If individual vines are renewed over time, but the parcel, propagation system, local material and method of cultivation persist, at what point does it stop being the same vineyard?

Perhaps it does not.

Perhaps continuity in a vineyard has never depended on the survival of every individual plant.

What phylloxera changed

The force of that idea becomes clearer when set against what phylloxera did to European viticulture.

The insect did not merely kill vines. It transformed the biological architecture of vineyards.

The practical solution adopted across much of Europe was grafting: European wine varieties were placed onto resistant American rootstocks. The varieties above ground might remain Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, but the root systems beneath them were fundamentally different.

Bollinger’s two Aÿ clos preserve something rare because that transformation did not take place there.

Their Pinot Noir remains ungrafted.

The vines are also planted en foule, rather than in conventional rows. This dense, irregular pattern changes the physical reality of working the vineyard. Machinery designed for straight modern vineyards cannot simply pass through. Bollinger describes manual cultivation and the use of a horse.

Then there is provignage, which determines not only how vines are replaced but how the population renews itself through time.

Taken together, these features describe something more consequential than picturesque old-fashioned vineyard scenery.

They describe a system.

That system is arguably the most convincing sense in which pre-phylloxera Champagne survives at Bollinger.

Not necessarily as an untouched collection of nineteenth-century plants.

As a way of maintaining a vineyard.

The problem with “survivor”

The word survivor is irresistibly powerful in wine.

It suggests catastrophe followed by endurance. A vine stands where others died. Its roots descend through a soil untouched by the compromises imposed after phylloxera. The bottle becomes a liquid connection to a vanished world.

There is nothing wrong with romance in wine.

But romance becomes more compelling when its terms are precise.

If Kelley’s account of 1970s replanting is correct, then the present vines of Vieilles Vignes Françaises should not simply be described as individual nineteenth-century survivors.

That does not diminish Clos Saint-Jacques or Les Chaudes Terres.

It changes the nature of what is remarkable about them.

The sites remain historic.

The vines remain ungrafted.

The cultivation remains exceptional.

The planting system preserves a pre-modern form of vineyard organisation.

Provignage allows successive generations of vines to arise from the existing population.

And, if the reported use of local Aÿ massal material is accurate, the vines may preserve a biological lineage whose significance cannot be reduced to the age of any one plant.

The story becomes less miraculous.

It also becomes more interesting.

Can we taste any of this?

There is a temptation, inevitably, to move from viticultural difference to sensory certainty.

Ungrafted vines are often discussed as if own-rootedness must leave an identifiable signature in the glass: greater purity, different texture, some privileged access to terroir.

That is much harder to demonstrate than to suggest.

Vieilles Vignes Françaises is not an experiment in which one variable can be isolated. Its wines emerge from two tiny sites with unusual planting density and vineyard management, particular vine material and very limited production, all interpreted within Bollinger’s own winemaking.

Whatever distinguishes the wine cannot simply be assigned to the absence of American rootstock.

Nor can old age, provignage, planting density or genetic diversity be tasted separately from one another.

That does not render them irrelevant.

It simply means that wine resists the tidy causality we sometimes want to impose upon it.

The fascination of Vieilles Vignes Françaises is therefore not that it allows us to taste nineteenth-century Champagne untouched by history.

Nothing can do that.

Its importance lies in the survival of something more complicated.

Lineage rather than immortality

Perhaps the greatest mistake is to imagine an old vineyard as a museum.

Museums preserve objects by preventing them from changing.

Vineyards cannot work that way.

They are populations of living plants. They grow, decline and die. They are pruned, propagated and replaced. Even when growers seek continuity, the vineyard itself is constantly changing.

Vieilles Vignes Françaises is compelling because its form of continuity appears to acknowledge that reality.

The two clos do not need every vine to have survived since the nineteenth century in order to retain a meaningful relationship with pre-phylloxera Champagne.

What matters may instead be that a particular kind of viticulture has continued.

The Pinot Noir remains ungrafted.

The vines remain planted en foule.

New plants can still emerge through provignage from vines already living in the parcel.

The vineyards still demand a form of cultivation increasingly alien to the uniform rows surrounding them.

What has survived, then, may not be a collection of immortal plants.

It may be a living lineage.

That is a subtler claim than “pre-phylloxera vines”.

It is also a more remarkable one.

Because the true rarity of Vieilles Vignes Françaises may not be that nothing has changed.

It may be that the vineyard has found a way to change without entirely breaking with what came before.