100% Pinot Noir

Food pairings: Roast lamb, beef tenderloin, duck with cherries, mushroom risotto and aged hard cheeses.

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. Taillepieds is fermented with whole clusters for about four weeks, then aged for about 26 months in used French oak barrels and bottled unfiltered.

Vineyards and terroir: Taillepieds lies on the southwestern side of Volnay, and Roblet-Monnot's biodynamically farmed, densely planted plot of massale-selection vines sits in the centre of the vineyard, facing southeast. The soil is fine, brown Oxfordian limestone, moderately deep and very stony, under a thin layer of topsoil known locally as "tête de moine".

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).