Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Nuits

Climb behind the famous villages of the Côte de Nuits and you reach the Hautes-Côtes: a landscape of hills, woods and combes, a couple of degrees cooler than the Côte below on a summer day.

The vineyard was huge before phylloxera, then almost disappeared: by the 1950s only a few hundred hectares remained in the whole of the Hautes-Côtes, and growers made a living from mixed farming. The Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Nuits appellation, created in 1961, gave the area its own identity, and plantings roughly doubled between 1975 and 1990.

Mostly red, from Pinot Noir, with some white and a little rosé. With warmer summers, these cooler slopes are attracting more and more growers… and curious drinkers.