The Dovecote Below the Château

The label gives almost nothing away. Vosne-Romanée, La Colombière, a crest, a vintage — no premier cru, no grand cru, none of the words that make people sit up. What it does carry, in small type at the bottom, is mis en bouteille au château: bottled at the Château de Vosne-Romanée, which is the point the wine quietly makes all evening.

La Colombière takes its name from a colombier, a dovecote — the sort of thing that stood beside a seigneurial house, and a reminder that this parcel has belonged to the Liger-Belair family’s holdings in Vosne for a very long time. The lieu-dit runs to a little under four hectares at the base of the slope, just east of the village where it presses up against the ground below Romanée-Saint-Vivant. The domaine works a small piece of it, immediately downhill from its own monopole, Clos du Château, on soils that turn heavier and more clay-rich as the land flattens out.

Old Vines at the Bottom of the Slope

Heavy clay at the foot of the hill usually means a broader, more earthbound wine, and La Colombière obliges: it is one of the firmer, more reserved village wines in Vosne, slower to open than its neighbours and built on tannin rather than perfume. What complicates the picture is the age of the vines, most of them well past their sixtieth year and some considerably older. That depth of root is what keeps the wine from reading as merely sturdy.

There is also the matter of who is making it. The domaine as it exists today was reassembled from almost nothing: the estate was largely broken up and auctioned in 1933, and for close to seven decades the surviving parcels were worked by sharecroppers and sold on by négociants. From 2000, Louis-Michel Liger-Belair began taking the family’s vineyards back into direct control as the leases fell in, and La Colombière was among the very first — part of the initial hectare and a half he farmed himself. It is not the famous name in the cellar, but it was there at the beginning of the modern domaine.

2015

2015 in the Côte de Nuits was a hot, dry summer that followed a mild, wet winter, and the reserves laid down over those wet months turned out to matter enormously. Warm nights in late June and July cost growers fruit, and the heat kept the berries small; yields came in low and concentration came in high. In Vosne the results were rich without collapsing, and the vintage has been described by growers there as an aristocratic one — full-bodied, but with the frame still visible under the flesh.

At five years old this bottle was young by any measure, and a village wine from a warm year is one of the more honest ways to meet a vintage: no grand cru architecture to distract you, just the fruit and the soil and the season. It gave dark cherry and raspberry with a bitter-edged spice behind it, a compact, chewy middle, and tannins that were ripe but far from resolved. The clay showed in the weight; the old vines showed in the length.

The Company It Kept

It was opened alongside a La Tâche 2008 and a Krug 1998 — a table where a village Vosne could very easily have been reduced to a warm-up act. It wasn’t, quite. Set beside the monopole from the same commune, it made the case for the bottom of the slope: less lift, less filigree, more grip and more soil, and an unmistakable family resemblance in the aromatics.

That resemblance is the whole argument for buying the modest bottles from great addresses. You do not get the grand cru. You get the hand.

The same argument, from the same vintage, on ground outside the family’s own commune: the domaine’s Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Cras.