2023 Domaine Rougeot Meursault 'Sous la Velle' (San Sufre)

Domaine Rougeot is a family estate based in Meursault, run today by Pierre-Henri Rougeot, who returned to the property in 2010 and has since transitioned the domaine's roughly 13 hectares of vines to organic and biodynamic farming. His approach blends traditional Burgundian technique with a natural wine sensibility: minimal sulfur across the board, with each barrel tasted individually throughout élevage and only small additions made when truly needed. When a barrel needs no sulfur at all, it's bottled completely sans soufre under a distinct diagonal-stripe label, always in very limited quantities. Sous la Velle, meaning "under the village," sits at the foot of the Meursault hill directly opposite the Château de Meursault, on a 2.5-hectare plot where the soils turn richer and denser, with less limestone than higher up the slope. This bottling comes from vines over 55 years old. In the cellar, the fruit is hand-harvested and pressed whole-bunch and untrimmed, given two days of cold settling, then fermented with native yeasts and taken through malolactic fermentation entirely in barrel. It matures for a long 20 months in oak with no bâtonnage, and is bottled unfined and unfiltered, letting the wine's natural texture and clarity carry through untouched. The result is a wine of real density and precision: a nose blending almond and wet stone, more tactile than purely aromatic, that expands slowly on the palate before tightening into a mouthwatering, saline tension. Other tasters have found ripe white fruit and candied lemon alongside a whisper of hazelnut and a discreet mineral frame, generous in the way classic Meursault should be, but kept honest and precise by real structural backbone. It's a genuine, quietly serious expression of village-level Meursault from an estate that has built its reputation without much fanfare, energetic, textured, and true to its specific corner of the appellation, richer soils, less limestone, and correspondingly more weight and substance than sites higher on the slope.