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Appellation · France

Vosne-Romanée

The village holding Romanée-Conti and six other Grand Crus, and the most expensive patch of vineyard on earth.

Vosne-Romanée AOCcontinentalcool
What to expect in the glass

Medium-bodied Pinot Noir with dark cherry, spice and a warm, exotic aromatic character. High acidity, fine tannin, and more flesh than the neighbouring villages.

About Vosne-Romanée

Vosne-Romanée is a small village with an extraordinary concentration of Grand Cru land: Romanée-Conti, La Tâche, Richebourg, La Romanée, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, La Grande Rue and Échezeaux-plus-Grands-Échezeaux in the adjoining commune of Flagey.

The style is the most opulent on the Côte de Nuits — richer and spicier than Chambolle, more aromatic than Gevrey, with a distinctive exotic note of cinnamon and dark cherry that tasters associate specifically with the village.

Romanée-Conti is 1.8 hectares producing a few thousand bottles a year, and is the most expensive wine in the world by a considerable margin. Whether it is proportionately better is not a question the evidence can settle; that it is proportionately scarcer certainly is.

Village-level Vosne-Romanée is itself expensive by Burgundian standards, which is partly quality and substantially the postcode.

What the name means

Legal name
Vosne-Romanée AOC
Type
Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée / Protégée (AOC / AOP)
Set by
INAO
Regulates
Origin, plus grape varieties, maximum yields, minimum ageing.

The delimited area, permitted varieties, maximum yields, minimum alcohol, pruning and training methods, and in many cases minimum ageing. Administered by INAO.

Worth knowing

Seven Grand Crus lie within the commune, including Romanée-Conti and La Tâche, both monopoles of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Each is a separate appellation.

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.

Rules worth knowing

Confirmed in the EU register

Vosne-Romanée is registered as a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), file number PDO-FR-A0504, protected at EU level since 1973.

Article 107 of Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013

Only the rules that change what to expect in the glass or on the label. WineHQ does not reproduce production specifications, and each entry carries the date it was last checked because appellation rules change.

The designation is confirmed above. WineHQ has not read this appellation’s production specification, so it publishes no yields, ageing minima or permitted-variety lists for it — those come from the document linked above, not from a summary of it.

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.

Where to go next

Places worth trying if you like this one — neighbours, rivals, and the obvious step across.

  • Vougeot — A tiny commune almost entirely occupied by one fifty-hectare Grand Cru with eighty owners.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Location

Approximate centroid: 47.17°, 4.95°. WineHQ stores coordinates only where it has them, and does not estimate boundaries it has not sourced.

Sources

Sources consulted