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 name likely descends from caracos, a Gaulish word for a heap of fallen stones. Les Crais sits on an alluvial fan just east of the village, at 280 meters, where up to 40 percent of the soil is rounded gravel and cobble washed out of two neighboring combes. Lavalle ranked it a second growth in 1855, and Denis Berthaut bottled it on its own for years before his daughter took over. The family holds most of the 1.73-hectare site, with vines dating to 1946. The 2024 includes a share of whole clusters and was aged in barrels, about 20 percent of them new.
Raspberry and redcurrant come first, followed by rose hip, cracked pepper from the stems, and a faint sea-spray salinity. The tannins are fine and the acidity crisp. Drink from 2027 through 2034.
