Domaine Pierre Girardin Morey-Saint-Denis 1er Cru "Les Monts Luisants"

Pierre-Vincent Girardin launched his domaine in 2016 at roughly 19 years old — the 13th generation of a Burgundian winemaking family — and immediately broke from the richer, more extracted house styles that dominated his appellation. Les Monts Luisants sits on the upper slope of Morey-Saint-Denis, where thin Jurassic marl over fragmented limestone scree at approximately 280–300 m elevation forces vines into deep root systems, producing small-berried fruit with pronounced mineral tension and cooler aromatic register than lower-slope premiers crus. The 2022 vintage, warm but retaining freshness in elevated parcels, amplifies the site's characteristic iron-laced earth and dark fruit concentration without sacrificing lift. In the cellar, Girardin vinifies with 100% whole-cluster inclusion (a practice adopted across his red range from 2021), employing long gentle pressing with little to no pigeage — a deliberate choice to build texture through stem tannin rather than extraction. Aging runs 12 months in 228-litre barrels at low new-oak percentage, followed by three months in tank before bottling unfined and unfiltered on the lunar calendar. The special feature here: Les Monts Luisants is one of Morey's most topographically extreme premiers crus, historically planted to Aligoté and Chardonnay on its uppermost sections — Girardin's red interpretation from this site is a deliberate transgression of that white-wine legacy, channelling the climat's stony austerity into Pinot Noir of uncommon structural tension.