Domaine Albert Morot Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Clos de la Bataillère Blanc 2023

A white marked by balance and energy, by length and by elegance. The domaine suggest it with chicken in a cream sauce or with scallops in lemon butter, which tells you the shape of it: generous enough to carry richness, fresh enough to cut through it.

The Clos de la Bataillère is a monopole, and at 1.87 hectares the largest parcel Albert Morot own. It takes its name from a M. Bataille who once held it, and sits beside the old road from Beaune to Vergy, which is where the Vergelesses name comes from, recorded as Vergelosses as far back as 830. It was already highly regarded in the nineteenth century: in 1855 Jules Lavalle, the botanist whose work prefigured the classification of Burgundy’s climats, listed la Bataillère among the strongly esteemed and marked it tête de cuvée. The white comes off 1.30 hectares of Chardonnay on sandy limestone facing south to south-east, planted at 10,000 vines per hectare. Hand harvested into 15kg cases and sorted twice, whole-bunch pressed, fermented on indigenous yeasts in 350-litre French oak and aged fourteen months in the same, with a slow malolactic, no racking, and bottled by gravity without fining or filtration.