Burgundy is built on hierarchy, and the hierarchy is strict. At the base sit the regional appellations — plain Bourgogne, the everyday glass. Above them the village wines, where the name of the commune is the story: Volnay, Pommard, Gevrey-Chambertin. Above those the Premiers Crus, where the village gives way to a named climat — a specific parcel with its own character, its own history, its own logic. And at the apex the Grand Crus, thirty-three of them in all of Burgundy, where the climat name alone is enough. The bottle in front of me sits at the third level: Volnay Premier Cru, Les Caillerets — the one that Jules Lavalle rated Tête de cuvée — literally "head of the batch," the top of the commune — in his Histoire et Statistique de la Vigne et des Grands Vins de la Côte d'Or, published in 1855. Jules Lavalle (sources often refer to him as Jean Lavalle — Jean was his baptismal name — and his books were published as "M. J. Lavalle", M standing for Monsieur) was a doctor and naturalist from Dijon, not a winemaker, which is perhaps why his classification of Burgundy's terroirs has never received the same attention as the Bordeaux classification produced that same year. In Burgundy itself, it remains the foundational text.
Volnay is one of the southern villages of the Côte de Beaune, and its reputation has always rested on finesse rather than power. The soils here are limestone-driven and relatively light, and the Pinot Noir they produce tends toward red fruit and a silky texture rather than the darker, denser profile of Pommard to the south. Les Caillerets — the name comes from chailles, the small limestone stones scattered through the soil — sits on a southeast-facing slope at roughly 250 to 275 metres, clayey limestone over a stony plateau. Bouchard describes two distinct characters within the holding: Les Caillerets Porte, which brings finesse and tension from its more limestone-driven parcels; and Les Caillerets Travers, which adds depth and concentration from the clay-limestone mid-slope. That is why this wine has more authority than the Volnay village stereotype, without losing the elegance that makes the commune worth the conversation.
The Ancienne Cuvée Carnot in the name is not marketing decoration. Carnot was the family that owned this parcel before Bouchard acquired it in 1775 — the first vineyard the house ever bought, and the founding act of the domaine. Ancienne Cuvée means simply "the old batch" — the historic bottling the house has produced since the very beginning. Bouchard kept the Carnot name on the label as a mark of respect for that history, and it has been there ever since. Bouchard Père & Fils was established in Beaune in 1731, and is now anchored at the Château de Beaune, with roughly 130 hectares of vines across the Côte d'Or, including 12 hectares of Grand Cru and 74 hectares of Premier Cru land. For the 2018 vintage, the wine spent 16 to 20 months in French oak with 35 to 40 percent new barrels — which tells you this cuvée is handled as a flagship, not a volume line. The 2018 Burgundy growing season was warm and generous, giving ripe, concentrated fruit with naturally balanced structure — one of the better recent vintages for the Côte de Beaune.
I opened it with a T-bone — at the upper limit of what this wine handles comfortably. A heavier cut, or a crust burned to bitterness and char, and the steak would have started to dominate. What saved the pairing — and made it genuinely work — were the mushrooms alongside it, earthy and rich, exactly the kind of flavour that pulls Burgundian Pinot Noir into focus. Duck would have been the more obvious choice. But the mushrooms got us there.
This is, by my count, the third story on this blog about Pinot Noir — which sits awkwardly with the fact that I have never considered myself a fan of the variety. Les Caillerets has been rated at the top of Volnay since 1855. Some things take a long time to establish — once established, they tend to hold, and that was my inspiration to write about this Pinot.
Pairs well with
