feature / Sarah Marsh MW / Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes


I wanted to know more about managing a vineyard on the


Hautes-Côtes and the effect of climate change on the vines and wines: What motivates the new wave of producers, and what lies behind the 20th-century Hautes-Côtes gold rush? Tasting Hautes-Côtes wines along the way, I would immerse myself in the diversity of the terroir and pass along the intel.


A long history But first a little history, courtesy of Nicolas Thevenot and Laurent Delaunay. Before Edouard Delaunay sold its business to Boisset in 1993, its 30ha (75 acres) of vineyard included a little Hautes- Côtes de Nuits. “I was a great fan and convinced by the Hautes- Côtes from the early 1990s,” remarks Laurent Delaunay, who was secretary of the appellation’s growers syndicate at the time. He tells me that viticulture started in the Hautes-Côtes at the same time as the Côte d’Or, so around the 2nd century CE, supported by documentary evidence from the 8th century pertaining to donations of vineyards to local abbeys. “By the early Middle Ages, they recognized the quality of the wine. Some were classified Vin du Clos, the highest category reserved for the nobility and the religious elite. A wine from Meloisey was served to celebrate the accession to the throne of Philip Augustus in 1179.” Laurent describes this period until the 14th century as “the medieval climatic optimum,” which accounts for quality of the wine at the time. This declined during the mini-ice age that


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


lasted until the 19th century, when—particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries—it was too cold for quality production. By the 19th century, before phylloxera, the Hautes-Côtes was planted almost entirely to Gamay, “for climatic and economic reasons, to make everyday wines,” continues Laurent. The Côte d’Or, which was covered with a startling 33,000ha (81,500 acres) of vines—largely Gamay, 85% in Clos St-Jacques, for example, and more than half of Pommard—was the recipient of much of this wine. Laurent has calculated that to supply wine to the total population of vineyard workers in the area of the Côte d’Or, where four people per hectare (2.47 acres) were needed to work the tightly planted vines, would have required some 730,000hl a year. This could only have been met with low-end wine from the Hautes-Côtes, probably at around 8% ABV, assuming it was also diluted with 50% water. “After phylloxera, the Hautes-Côtes was replanted with


Gamay, probably 95%, which was a strategic mistake,” continues Laurent. The very local market for everyday wine, which had expanded using the canal system, increased rapidly with the railways, at which point the Hautes-Côtes lost out to cheaper wine from the South of France and Algeria (during World War I, the army looked to Algeria to supply troops, too). The Hautes-


Above: Laurent Delaunay of Maison Edouard Delaunay and BIVB president: “I was a great fan and convinced by the Hautes-Côtes from the early 1990s.”


Photography by Jon Wyand


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