Blog: France Space Explorationaccommodationfrance.info

Le Village Core En France

The Grands Crus cover 41.35 hectares, and wear the following labels:

Clos St.Denis : 6.62 hectares
I’ll nail my colours to the mast; I have, for years, been a bigger fan of Clos St.Denis than the Clos de la Roche, but Laurent Ponsot has certainly given me recent food for thought. The best wines of the genre are sensual, beguilingly fruited wines.  The Clos St.Denis starts in the village and radiates to the north, mainly sited just a little lower on the slope than the Clos de la Roche. A relatively wide road separates it to the south from the Clos des Lambrays. Seemingly named after the Chapter of Saint Denis which was created in 1203, this was apparently an original ‘Clos’, though the walls are mainly long-since gone. It has significantly grown over the years, originally being only one third of its current 6.6 hectares. For the AOC in 1936 it absorbed parts of the named areas of Maison Brulée, La Calouère and a part Les Chaffots. The soil is very typical of Morey, a mix of red-brown clay soil mixed with small rocks over a base of limestone. The first known owner of the vineyard was the church of St.Denis de Vergey, founded in 1203, hence the name. After the revolution it was the Marey / Marey-Monge family who were the principle owners, and perhaps their plant material was not so good as others, as the Clos St.Denis was not regarded as one of the best of the village at that time, but today’s 100 year-old vines, owned by the Mercier family and transmuted to wine by Laurent Ponsot is one of the great cuvées of the Côte de Nuits. Just a little behind Ponsot is the cuvée from Dujac – the biggest owner of vines in the cru – another perennial favourite of mine is Louis Jadot.

Clos de Tart : 7.53 hectares
There is more about this true Clos and Monopole vineyard here, but when discussing in the context of Morey, like the Clos des Lambrays, the vines are planted north-south and the ground is similarly quite stony high up. The soil is darker and less red as there is little of the iron in the clay found in the other vineyards of Morey. If we ignore for a second the shared grand cru of Bonnes-Mares, this is the most southern of the Morey grand crus. Despite a similar post-revolution ownership as the Clos St.Denis by the Marey / Marey-Monge family, this has always been ranked as one of the top vineyards in Morey, despite only getting it’s AOC as a grand cru 1939. There was a bit of 1980-1990’s lull, but from 2002 onwards the Mommessin owned vines have been producing stunning wine after stunning wine, though pricing has tripled to ‘compensate’. An average of 25,000 bottles per year wear the Clos du Tart label.

Clos des Lambrays : 8.80 hectares
Again, a fuller text can be found here. Of all the grand cru vineyards, it is probably the Clos des Lambrays that represents the ‘purest slice’ of Morey. From low lying, denser red clay soil to the sparser, rocky soil high on the hill, this is a blend of all Morey in one bottle – particularly as the vines stretch up the hillside just a little further than all the other grand crus. At its best a wine of wonderful aromatics, understated power and complexity. Less concentrated than the best Clos St.Denis, a good Clos de Tart or Bonnes-Mares, and certainly not the extra minerality of the best Clos de la Roche.

Clos de la Roche : 16.90 hectares
Laurent Ponsot probably has the best-sited parcels of old vines in the original boundaries of both the Clos de la Roche and the Clos St.Denis and is thus uniquely qualified to register an opinion, and he is convinced that the Clos de la Roche is a more gifted terroir than the Clos St.Denis. In the 1850’s Dr. Lavalle and similarly in the late 1800’s Danguy and Aubertin gave the Clos de la Roche and the Clos St.Denis the same classification in their respective books – though both vineyards were ranked behind the Clos de Tart in those times. The original boundaries of the Clos de la Roche were much smaller at about 4.57 hectares though there seems little evidence that it was ever really a ‘Clos’ – again the Marey family were the main owners, this time with the Bizot family. If you walk all the boundaries of the Clos it’s no surprise, given its size, that it’s far from a homogenous entity. This quadrupling of size came by the absorption of neighbouring areas in the lieu-dits of Chabiots, Fremières, Froichots, Mauchamps and the bottom half of Monts-Luisants – this was at the time of the AOC ‘grand cru’ being achieved in 1936.  In 1971 parts of the lieu-dits of Les Chaffots and Les Genavrières were also accepted as ‘Clos de la Roche’ by the INAO.  You can still see these lieu-dits on maps, and given the topographic diversity, they better define the vineyard than the single Clos de la Roche name. That the average quality of wine from the vineyard is so high is a testament to the quality of the land – I can contrast that with the much more hap-hazard quality that you’d find from the even more topographically diverse Echézeaux vineyard for instance. That the key producers are Ponsot, Leroy, Dujac, branches of the Lignier clan, plus the recently improving cuvée from Rousseau goes a long way to explaining the renown of the wine, but there are many ’smaller’ producers with tasty bottles. The northern edge of the vineyard is a stone-throw away from Charmes(Mazoyères)-Chambertin and smaller producers here do not have the same lofty success as achieved in Clos de la Roche.

Bonnes Mares : 1.50 hectares
It’s a small section of Bonnes Mares that rests within Morey St.Denis, the majority of the vineyard (another 13.5 hectares) lies in Chambolle-Musigny. The Morey portion belongs to Clair family of Marsannay, but since 1986 was on a long-term lease to the domaine Fougeray de Beauclair, also based in Marsannay, who, because of the original Clair-Daü sale agreement to Jadot, Fougeray inherited the obligation to continue to sell one third of their Bonnes Mares grapes to Louis Jadot. For 2005, Fougeray took 100% of the parcel, but it changed again in 2006 with just over 0.4 hectares moving to Bernard Clair following the death of his father (the owner). This Morey section is (mainly – 95%) from the ‘terres rouges’ section of the vineyard – unsurprising given the iron-rich red soil that predominates in Morey.

Leggere queste pagine mi ha provocato un tuffo al cuore, fatto ricordare i meravigliosi tempi del Rangio Fellone, di un’isola bella che si era affacciata solo da poco al turismo, dove si respirava davvero la dolce vita. Un’atmosfera unica. Io cantavo “Nun è peccato”, la stupenda canzone di Ugo Calise, che ebbe un grande successo. Intorno c’era il magico mondo del cinema, della mondanità internazionale. Una specie di grande piazza dove ci si poteva esibire, anche se non si era ancora famosi, con la certezza che c’era tanta gente competente ad ascoltarti. Io ho iniziato a suonare il pianoforte quando ero proprio piccolo. A quattro anni strimpellavo canzonette americane per il generale Clark perché gli americani erano di stanza a Capri. Ed è una cosa che mi sono portato dentro, così quando ho cominciato a cantare – inizialmente mi esibivo come pianista perché i miei non vedevano di buon occhio la musica leggera – ovviamente le mie performance erano infl uenzate da quel genere un po’ rockeggiante. Il mio primo vero grande successo l’ho trovato a Ischia, 50 anni fa, al Rangio Fellone. C’era una vita notturna straordinaria con almeno una decina di night mentre Capri ne contava due o tre. Un periodo meraviglioso, irripetibile. L’isola allora era la capitale della musica italiana: solo qui insieme con gli artisti di fama internazionale si esibivano i gruppi, i giovani che come me sperimentavano, che mettevano insieme generi all’apparenza diversi. Questo poteva accadere soltanto perché da Napoli, che è sempre stata la culla della musica, d’estate si spostava gente che portava con sé la voglia di sentire le novità, di ascoltare i giovani artisti. In questo libro ho scoperto che Lucio Battisti amava la musica napoletana, che era convinto che la grande melodia italiana traesse origine tutta da lì, che la matrice fosse nostra. E visto che l’altro grande fi lone musicale è quello americano, anche lui è arrivato al successo facendo tesoro delle sonorità, dei ritmi che probabilmente aveva assorbito proprio a Napoli. Mi ha fatto piacere sapere da Anna Maria Chiariello, della grande ammirazione che Battisti aveva per esempio per “Munasterio ‘e Santa Chiara”, che io ho sempre cantato con piacere, e che probabilmente studiava queste musiche, facendo tesoro di tutto quello di cui erano e sono ancora portatrici. Nel ’63 Lucio Battisti si esibiva a Forio d’Ischia, dall’altro lato dell’isola c’ero pure io. C’era Mina. Assaporavamo il successo che nel frattempo aveva voluto baciarci. C’erano grandi artisti di fama internazionale. E mi piace pensare che qualcosa a questo musicista l’abbiamo data pure noi. Forse la napoletanità dolce che si respirava a Ischia, forse quello spirito di frontiera, di grande apertura alle novità che per uno come lui che credeva che la musica dovesse rinnovarsi sempre, sono stati importanti. Ma mi piace anche credere che Ischia, a lui come a me, gli abbia portato fortuna e gli abbia consentito di realizzare i suoi sogni di musicista. Peppino Di Capri