HAUTES-CÔTES: GOING UP IN THE WORLD


BOURGOGNE


With climate change making the area increasingly attractive for Côte d’Or growers, but with wine prices still keen, Bourgogne Hautes- Côtes has never been more popular. Guided by some of the area’s leading producers, Sarah Marsh MW takes a tour of a rising-star terroir


hese days, nobody scoffs at wine from Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes. On the contrary, over the past decade or so, its popularity and profile have risen higher than anyone could have foreseen, albeit that many astute producers the Côte d’Or took a punt and bought land there when it was dirt-cheap in the 1990s. Two significant factors are responsible for the Hautes-Côtes’s current popularity: the warmer growing seasons due to climate change, which enable fruit to ripen fully more often than not, and the overinflated prices of many wines from the Côte d’Or. Put this together with improvements in viticulture and winemaking over the past two decades—and, for that matter, older vines—and you have a winning formula. Casting my eye along the Hautes-Côtes, I was spoiled for choice as to which domaines I might visit. I plumped for Thevenot-Le Brun & Fils, Henri Naudin-Ferrand, and Boris Champy, to which I added visits to many more producers based on the Côte d’Or—some with Hautes-Côtes vineyards owned for generations, others with land snaffled more recently. There are no flies on Michel Gros’s family in Vosne-Romanée, who had the foresight to start accruing land near Chaux in the 1970s; while Johnny-come-lately types include Domaine Leflaive, which purchased and planted 4ha (10 acres) in Nantoux on the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune in 2021. Domaine Cathiard has even built a new cellar to vinify the heightened production from its 2021 acquisition. Many others, Maison Edouard Delaunay included, lease vineyards or purchase fruit.


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Left: Villars La Fontaine in the Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, which may be less developed than the Côte d’Or, but where viticulture started equally early.


THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 109


Photography by Jon Wyand


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