Mathé Livera came to Burgundy from Italy in 1920 as a mason; stone brought him to Gevrey-Chambertin before wine did. He bought his first vines that year and moved his family into a former coaching inn between the church and the château, an odd, turreted building that had once stabled a count's horses. For most of the century that followed, the Liveras farmed their vines and sold the fruit to the big houses in Beaune. Philippe took over from his parents in 1986 and kept the arrangement. His son Damien, who took the reins in 2007, did not. He built a new winery first, then vintage by vintage brought the family's fruit home to bottle under their own name, with his sister Hélène working alongside him. The estate is small, around eight hectares and nearly all pinot noir, with vines that go back to the 1950s and 60s. Damien pulled the herbicides out when he arrived; the soils are plowed, treated with plant-based preparations, and the crop is thinned by hand through the season, from leaf-pulling to a green harvest, before it's picked by hand.

Clos Village is a walled plot directly across the lane from the coaching inn, roughly a hectare and a half of shallow, rocky ground planted more than seventy years ago. It has been the view from the Livera kitchen for four generations. Damien can walk from his cellar door into the rows in under a minute — it's the wine closest to home, and the one closest to what the family means when they say Gevrey.

In the cellar, things move slowly. The fruit is fully destemmed and fermented in vats on native yeasts, then aged around sixteen months in barrel, only about a third of it new. The cellar is cold enough that the malolactic fermentation drags on for months, and the family keeps a little natural CO2 in the young wine so they can use less sulfur. Barrels share the room with homemade saucisson. The 2023 is dark and generous, black cherry and licorice with an earthy, savory depth and fine powdery tannins. Lovely now with a decant, or lovely in five to ten years of cellar time.