Volnay

Volnay

A red-only village in the middle of the Côte de Beaune, between Pommard and Meursault. Volnay has no Grand Cru, but it has a long and highly regarded Premier Cru list.

The hierarchy

The leading 1er Crus are Les Caillerets, Clos des Chênes, Taillepieds, Champans, Clos des Ducs and Santenots — the last of which is worth explaining: Santenots lies inside the Meursault commune, but red wine from it is sold as Volnay-Santenots, while white from the same ground is sold as Meursault.

What to expect

Volnay is generally the lightest-framed red in the Côte de Beaune — paler and lower in tannin than Pommard next door. That makes it easy to serve too warm, and easy to assume it will not keep. Good Volnay 1er Cru holds for fifteen years.

Serving

14–16°C. Village level from four years; 1er Cru rewards eight or more, and a short decant on the day.

One more glass

It is worth being precise about what Premier Cru actually classifies in Burgundy, because it is easy to read it as a quality guarantee.

It classifies land. The boundaries were drawn from centuries of observation about which plots ripen best, and they were fixed in law in the 1930s. What they describe is the plot, not the bottle. Two 1er Cru wines from the same vineyard and the same vintage, made by two different growers, can differ more from each other than a careful grower's village wine differs from a less careful grower's 1er Cru.

So the tier reliably tells you two things: the plot's long-run reputation, and the price. It does not tell you that you will prefer what is in the glass. Both names on the label matter — the vineyard and the domaine — and in a commune like Volnay, where the village plots sit directly below the 1er Crus on the same slope, the second name carries a lot of the weight.