“Pataille is proof that major Burgundy can come from a minor address,” Jancis Robinson has written of the humble village of Marsannay. Sylvain Pataille’s father, a bus driver by trade, spent his free time helping in a friend’s vineyards, and an uncle owned an estate in Bordeaux that the family visited every summer. Even as a child, Sylvain knew he belonged among the vines. He started with a single hectare in 1999 and slowly built the domaine to 15, farming organically since 2008 with biodynamic methods and consulting as an oenologist across the region. Along the way he turned single-site aligoté into one of the most talked-about categories in Burgundy.

La Charme aux Prêtres sits on the mid to lower slope at 280 to 320 meters, facing south and west, its aligoté planted in 1949. The reddish-brown soil runs shallow and gravelly, as much as 40% angular stones over crinoidal and Comblanchien limestone, with a seam of Ostrea acuminata marl that Sylvain credits for the site’s reductive, flinty minerality. The name points to its past: a charme, or chaume, was rocky ground too poor to farm, and this one belonged to the local priests.

Meager yields from old vines make for a tiny production. Pressed on a vertical press, fermented with indigenous yeasts, and aged 18 months in used barrels, the 2023 is ripe but structured, with lemon oil, white peach, and chamomile wound through a chalky, savory spine. Immensely drinkable now, but will also reward a few years in the cellar.