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.
Les Blanchards sits in the center of the village, on the bed of a stream that once ran down from the Combe de Morey. The water carried and shattered the limestone as it went, leaving ground so pale that the climat was named for its whiteness. The vines, now well past 60 years old, have their roots in that broken white rock. From 0.27 hectares Arlaud makes about 2,100 bottles in a normal year. In 2024 the fruit that survived the spring was sorted twice, in the vineyard and again at the winery, and fermented with a third of it whole cluster.
The 2024 is expressive and detailed, with raspberry and blueberry laced with tobacco leaf and damp earth, fine tannin, sparkling acidity and a long, stony finish. Drink 2028 through 2045.
