"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.

Petit Puits, the “little well,” is a 0.59-hectare parcel of aligoté planted in 1929, its red clay laid over limestone. Vines approaching a century in age dig deep here, and the clay lends breadth to a grape more often prized for its edge.

The fruit is pressed on a vertical press and fermented with indigenous yeasts, then aged 12 to 18 months in used barrels with minimal sulfur at bottling. Round and expansive, it shows ripe pear, lemon curd, and dried fennel over an oyster-shell salinity, with the concentration only old vines provide. Stunning now, but will hold for years.