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Sub-region · France

Côte de Nuits

The northern half of the Côte d’Or, and the source of the world’s most celebrated Pinot Noir.

continentalcool

About Côte de Nuits

Almost all of Burgundy’s red Grands Crus sit here, in a strip only a few kilometres wide, running through Gevrey-Chambertin, Morey-Saint-Denis, Chambolle-Musigny, Vougeot, Vosne-Romanée and Nuits-Saint-Georges.

The wines are the more structured, darker-fruited and longer-lived of the two Côtes, with the perfume and silky texture that make Pinot Noir hard to imitate elsewhere.

Côte de Nuits is a sub-region, not an appellation

No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A named division within a wine region that carries no geographical indication of its own. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.

Grapes

Wines from here

red

Red Burgundy

Pinot Noir at its most perfumed and site-specific: pale, silky, high in acid, and the reference point for the variety worldwide.

Climate

Continental, with cold winters and warm summers, and a real risk of spring frost and summer hail — the two events that decide a vintage here more than heat does.

These are influences on how a wine turns out, not determinants of it. Picking date, yield, vine age and every winemaking decision sit between the climate and the glass.

Soil and geology

East-facing limestone and marl slopes, with the best sites in a narrow band mid-slope where drainage is sharpest and the soil thinnest. The valley floor, on deeper alluvial soil, makes regional wine.

WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.

Places within it

  • Chambolle-Musigny — The most delicate and perfumed of the Côte de Nuits villages, and the usual reference for what people mean by finesse in Pinot Noir.
  • Gevrey-Chambertin — The largest village of the Côte de Nuits and the most powerful, with nine Grand Crus including Chambertin itself.
  • Marsannay — The northernmost village of the Côte de Nuits, and the only one in the Côte d’Or with an appellation for rosé.
  • Morey-Saint-Denis — A small village between Gevrey and Chambolle whose wines sit stylistically between them, with five Grand Crus in barely a hundred hectares.
  • Nuits-Saint-Georges — The commercial town that gave the Côte de Nuits its name, with forty-one Premier Crus and no Grand Cru at all.
  • Vosne-Romanée — The village holding Romanée-Conti and six other Grand Crus, and the most expensive patch of vineyard on earth.
  • Vougeot — A tiny commune almost entirely occupied by one fifty-hectare Grand Cru with eighty owners.

Compared with

What to eat, and how to serve it

Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.

Red Burgundy

Serve at 14–16°C (cellar cool).

Try with fillet steak, mushroom pasta or steak with béarnaise.

Sources

Sources consulted