Louis Latour Chateau Corton Grancey Grand Cru

When Jean Latour's descendants built the Corton Grancey Cuverie into the hillside between 1832 and 1834, they created the first purpose-built winery in France — five levels of gravity-flow infrastructure dug 20 metres into the bedrock of Corton Grand Cru Perrières, a design that still moves every litre of this wine without a pump. Château Corton Grancey Grand Cru is produced only in declared vintages from a multi-climat blend of four named Corton Grand Cru parcels — Les Bressandes, Les Perrières, Les Grèves, and Le Clos du Roi — with proportions adjusted vintage to vintage, drawn from vines averaging 40+ years on the south-east face of the Hill of Corton, where red chalk, clay, and marl soils deliver structure and pigment density that pure limestone cannot. Grapes are 100% hand-harvested, fully destemmed, and fermented for approximately 14 days in large open wooden vats on the cuverie's first floor with manual pigeage, then aged in French oak for 10–12 months — barrels coopered in-house from oak air-dried 24–36 months. The house's most openly transgressive decision: all reds are flash-pasteurised at approximately 72°C for 2–3 seconds before bottling, eliminating fining entirely while remaining a point of critical debate on long-term aromatic development. The 2019 vintage shows ripe, complex fruit drinking well on release, with the multi-climat architecture providing layered textural depth no single-parcel Corton can replicate.