100% Pinot Noir

Food pairings: Roast poultry, duck, veal, mushroom dishes and soft-rind cheeses.

Winemaking: Each plot is vinified separately, using anywhere from 100% whole clusters to fully destemmed fruit. Pascal Roblet favours a gentle infusion over extraction, with very little punching down, and long barrel aging that clarifies the wine naturally; his reds are neither fined nor filtered, with minimal sulfur. Saint François is aged for about 26 months in French oak barrels, 10% of them new, and bottled unfiltered.

Vineyards and terroir: Saint François is a village Volnay assembled from several of the domaine's parcels: the lieux-dits Bouchères, Sur Roche, Buttes, Famines, Poison and Pasquiers, plus a share of premier cru Robardelle. The biodynamically farmed vines are massale-selection Pinot Noir, very densely planted, with an average age of 43, on varied soils across the Volnay slopes.

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. This cuvée is named in honour of his father, François. Pascal was one of Burgundy's early converts to biodynamic farming in 1997, works with high-density plantings and very low yields, and makes his wines in a small cellar in the hamlet of Bligny-lès-Beaune.

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