Vineyard Insight: Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Laviéres

There are a lot of interesting terroirs in the Vosne-Romanee appellation itself and in the twillight zone between Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vosne-Romanee.

This area is somewhat overlooked, but as the new generations of vignerons take on these terroirs, there are very fine wines to find from these vineyards.

I have already covered the vineyards:

Aux Réas
Clos des Réas
Aux Bas du Combe

Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Laviéres is next .. a very interesting village terroir, producing some top end NSG villages. The quality of the terroir is underlined by the fact that producers like Domaine Leroy and Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair produces lieu-dit villages from this vineyard .. so lets take a closer look at Aux Laviéres.

The twillight zone … around the border between Vosne and NSG

First a bit of background info – Nuits-Saint-Georges is stylewise divided in three sections – Premeaux in the south, the main and classic Nuits-Saint-Georges in the middle, and the Vosne section located between Vosne-Romanee and the city of Nuits-Saint-Georges.

The border between Nuits-Saint-Georges and Premeaux is well defined as Premeaux was a separate appellation in the old literature, and still is in the current cadastre system.

The border between classic Nuits-Saint-Georges and the Vosne styled Nuits-Saint-Georges is however not so well defined. Some say that the Vosne end is covering all of the vineyards located north of the city of Nuits-Saint-Georges – whereas I think that the vineyards just north of the city of Nuits-Saint-Georges are showing more signs of classic Nuits-Saint-Georges – i.e. a bit darker fruit and slightly more austerity is introduced in the wines – but that’s just a personal view.

This is of course also influenced by the producers, as a Vosne producers often will impose more “Vosne style” on the wines, whereas a Nuits-Saint-Georges producer will influence the outcome in a NSG way.

I will not try to define this border between the Vosne part of NSG and the classic Nuits-Saint-Georges in this article, but will focus on what I would like to call the twilight zone .. where Vosne-Romanee meets Nuits-Saint-Georges.

Top village vineyards according to the 1861 classification

The 1861 classification made by Comité d’Agriculture²is most likely the most detailed classification ever made for Burgundy. It’s also more or less the foundation for the current official classification of the Burgundian vineyards – that was established in and around 1936.