The story of Domaine Arlaud begins with a wedding. In 1942, Joseph Arlaud, a young man from the Ardèche, married Renée Amiot, whose Burgundian family gave the couple vineyards in Morey-Saint-Denis and Gevrey-Chambertin as a wedding present. Joseph began adding parcels in 1949, and in 1966 he acquired a 600-year-old cellar in Nuits-Saint-Georges, once the town’s salt store, that has appeared on every Arlaud label since. His son Hervé took over in 1983 and kept adding. The estate now covers 17 hectares and 19 appellations, including parcels in four grands crus. Hervé’s son Cyprien joined in 1998 and spent the next sixteen years taking the domaine organic and then biodynamic. In 2014 Arlaud became the first estate in Morey-Saint-Denis to hold Biodyvin certification. Since 2004 his sister Bertille has plowed the five hectares of premier and grand cru vines with the draft horses Nougat and Oka, whose hooves leave the soil loose where a tractor would pack it down. For years Cyprien braided only the Bonnes-Mares, weaving the canes along the top wire rather than hedging them, which spares the plant the stress of cutting and shades the fruit. In 2024 he extended the practice to every premier and grand cru. In the gravity-fed winery designed in 2003, the fruit is sorted on three lines, ferments uncrushed on indigenous yeasts in open vats worked by foot, and ages 15 to 18 months in barrel with no more than 20 percent new oak before it is bottled on the lunar calendar without fining or filtration.
Bonnes-Mares is the grand cru that joins Morey-Saint-Denis to Chambolle-Musigny. The Arlaud holding is 0.20 hectares on the Chambolle side, planted in 1979, in eight rows that run from the top of the slope to the bottom and so cross both of the vineyard’s famous soils, the iron-red clay above and the heavier white marl below. In a normal year it yields about 1,000 bottles. In 2024, a cold and sodden spring cut the domaine's crop by roughly 70 percent, and what survived ripened in three weeks of lovely September weather before Cyprien began picking on the 19th. A strict double sorting let him keep a third of the clusters whole, with the wine fermenting in an open wooden vat.
It opens with blackberry and blueberry, porcini and a trace of cedar pencil, then settles into a medium-bodied palate of fine tannin with a white-pepper lift from the stems and a density that very few wines of this vintage can claim. Neal Martin at Vinous awarded 95 points. Drink 2028 through 2048.
