The doorway at 9 Rue Noisot in Fixin has carried the same carved motto since 1693: Bien faire vaut mieux que dire. Doing well is better than saying so. Amélie Berthaut is the seventh generation of her family to make wine in this village. She trained as an agronomist and enologist in Bordeaux and worked harvests in Bandol, Napa, and New Zealand, and she came home with ideas. In the middle of the late, wet harvest of 2013, her father, Denis, told her that since she knew it all, she could make the wines. She was 25. Her domaine carries both her parents’ names: Berthaut for the family’s vines in Fixin, Gerbet for part of her mother’s family holdings in Vosne-Romanée, about 18 hectares in all. Her husband, Nicolas Faure, a veteran of the vineyards at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, farms them organically. In 1855, Dr. Jules Lavalle recorded that Fixin’s Clos de la Perrière sold for the same price as Chambertin; a century later the village was known for hard, rustic reds and little else. Amélie is widely credited with changing that. She ferments with indigenous yeasts in concrete tanks painted her favorite red-violet, extracts with pump-overs and a few light punch-downs by foot, and never fines. Her cellar sits near 45°F in winter, so the wines finish slowly and on their own schedule.

The village wine is a walk through Fixin itself. It blends five small lieux-dits, among them Le Village, the walled clos visitors see on entering the courtyard of the family’s tasting room, and Le Pré, a vineyard ringed by houses on the path from the tasting room to the cellar. The soils are deep clay lightened with silt and sand over sandy marl. In 2024 the blend also takes in a new holding in neighboring Brochon. The fruit was fully destemmed, and after a year in barrel the wine was assembled in foudre before bottling.

It smells of bright red cherry and wild strawberry, with rose petal as it opens. The finish brings cracked black pepper and a graphite note on fine tannins. Drink through 2031.