Lucien Le Moine

Lucien Le Moine is a small House of Grands Crus in Beaune. It is a two people operation established in1999: "we came here because of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, we stayed because we discovered "La Côte d'Or" and its wines but also the Burgundians as People and Friends.

Mounir learned and worked in a Trappist Monastery where he discovered Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. He studied Viticulture and Oenology at the ENSAM Montpellier, than had a 6 years experience in different Wineries in Burgundy, other areas of France and California where he became fascinated by the "old way" of growing, vinificating and aging wines. One day he decided to push to the extreme everything he saw and experienced and created, with Rotem, a small cellar dedicated to the ideas of purity and typicity.

Rotem comes from a cheese making family. She learned Agriculture both at the Technion and the ENESAD in Dijon and oriented her studies towards wine. At the end of her title she won a national prize from the French Academy of Agriculture for a study on the Côte d'Or than she participated in many Harvests in Burgundy and California. She joined Mounir in 1999 and they Started Lucien Le Moine together.

There is no winemaking involved as the wines reach them after fermentation. Often there is but a single cask of each wine – their 100 barrels of 2007 cover 68 different wines. There are no contracts with growers, though they will frequently return to the same sources, and no specific requirements as to how the grapes should have been grown or the wines made. Indeed it was very interesting to taste a line-up of Vosne-Romanée wines and see some which had evidently been vinified with stems and others not.

According to Rotem, her husband’s strength is that he can sniff out the quality and style of a vintage at a very early stage. They work closely with their barrel supplier, Stéphane Chassin, to ensure the right barrels for the style of a given wine, using wood from the Jupilles forest which is apparently the slowest growing in France, thus giving the most fine-grained wood. One hundred per cent new wood is used. The general recipe, although of course each vintage and if need be each wine may require its own treatment, is to ensure late malolactic fermentations, to stir up the plentiful lees for both red and white wines, to rely more on CO2 than SO2 to preserve the wine from oxidation and to maintain the wines unracked in new barrels until the final preparation before bottling. Typically the wines end up with a soft, sweet-fruit character but otherwise little other evidence of new oak, and those I have tasted have displayed good typicity of their vineyard origins. They are not cheap.