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.
On September 9, 1944, a Free French light tank called La Pourfendeuse was the first Allied vehicle into Vosne-Romanée. Its radio operator, François Gerbet, was invited to dinner by the Sirugue family, wrote to their daughter Suzette for the rest of the war, and married her in 1946. He spent his working life caring for the vineyards she inherited. Amélie is their granddaughter, and this wine comes from 1.2 hectares of Gerbet family vines in two village lieux-dits, Aux Réas and Au-Dessus de la Rivière, planted in 1935, 1949, and 1955. The 2024 was almost entirely destemmed and aged in barrels, about a third of them new.
Cranberry and raspberry open the nose, then rooibos tea and bergamot with air. The tannins are silky and pliant, and the bright finish leaves a trace of blueberry. Drink from 2028 through 2038.
