The Slope Above La Romanée

Aux Reignots is the vineyard you see when you stand in La Romanée and look uphill. It occupies the thin, stony ground just below the tree line on the Vosne-Romanée slope, above the grand crus, and the altitude does two things: it keeps the wine fresher and more mineral than the richer sites below, and it makes the vineyard’s fruit later and harder to ripen in a cool year.

Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair was set up at the beginning of 2000 by Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, an agricultural engineer and oenologist, on family vineyards that had been leased out for decades, and the estate has farmed biodynamically since 2008. The monopole of La Romanée is the domaine’s calling card; Aux Reignots, its neighbour above, is generally counted as one of the strongest premiers crus in the village and one that regularly punches above its rank.

The Year

2015 was hot and dry in the Côte de Nuits — small berries, low yields, concentrated fruit, and wines with more density than the village’s usual perfume. In a year like that a high, cool site is an advantage rather than a handicap: the altitude pulls the ripeness back toward balance.

The domaine’s other 2015s sit elsewhere in these pages — the village La Colombière and the Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Cras — and together they make a fairly complete picture of how the house handled the heat.

In the Glass

Opened at a restaurant counter as the Burgundy in a four-bottle evening otherwise given to Bordeaux and Champagne — the Cos d’Estournel 1975 and 1994, and a Bollinger La Grande Année 2002. Five years from the vintage, which is early.

Medium ruby, bright. The nose was Vosne in its higher-toned register — red cherry and raspberry, rose petal, a spicy, sandalwood note, and a stony, almost saline minerality that the hillside gives. The 2015 ripeness showed as depth of fruit rather than as jamminess.

The palate had real tension: fine, silky tannins, an acidity that kept it lifted, and a long, mineral finish that cooled the year’s warmth. It was concentrated without being heavy and, at five years, still clearly on the way somewhere.

The domaine’s La Romanée, from the ground directly below this vineyard, appears elsewhere in these pages from an older vintage. The family resemblance is obvious. The difference is altitude — and altitude, in 2015, was worth a great deal.