100% Pinot Noir

Food pairings: Roast duck, rack of lamb, beef tenderloin with mushrooms, game birds and aged Comté.

Winemaking: Grapes are sorted in the vineyard and again on a vibrating sorting table in the cellar. Pascal Roblet favours a long, gentle infusion rather than extraction, with very little punching down, and long barrel aging that clarifies the wine naturally; the wines are unfined and unfiltered, with minimal sulfur. Brouillards is fermented with whole clusters for about a month, then aged for about 26 months in French oak barrels, 25% of them new, and bottled unfiltered.

Vineyards and terroir: Les Brouillards lies just below the D973 road in Volnay, bordered by Les Mitans to the south and Pointes d'Angles above. Roblet-Monnot's biodynamically farmed, densely planted plot of massale-selection vines faces southeast on shallow, red-brown clay soil. The name comes from the old French breuil, a small wood or thicket, suggesting the land was once wooded.

Family and history: Pascal Roblet's family roots in Volnay go back to the 1600s on his mother's side. His maternal great-grandfather Victor Delagrange created the domaine in 1865; it passed to Henri Monnot in 1926 and later to François Roblet, and in 1990 Pascal took over and renamed it Domaine Roblet-Monnot. He was one of Burgundy's early converts to biodynamic farming in 1997, works with high-density plantings and very low yields, ploughs with horses, and makes his wines in a small cellar in the hamlet of Bligny-lès-Beaune. He releases each wine only when he believes it is ready.

In the pictures: Pascal Roblet drawing a sample in his Bligny-lès-Beaune cellar; barrels and cellar notes in the domaine's working cellar (photos: The Sorting Table, importer press kit).