Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru ''La Romanée"

Vincent Dancer arrived in Chassagne-Montrachet in 1996 not as a vigneron's heir but as an Alsatian-born engineer — and promptly became the village's first producer to achieve organic certification (2012), rewriting what Chassagne white could be in the process. La Romanée sits within the Premier Cru belt on the limestone-and-marl argilo-calcaire soils of the southeast-facing slope, where the clay fraction retains just enough moisture to sustain vines through dry summers while the fractured limestone drives the saline, stony tension that defines the cuvée. Yields are held to 15–25 hl/ha by horse-and-hand cultivation. Whole-cluster pneumatic pressing feeds fermentation with indigenous yeasts in barrel — no temperature control, no sulfur during fermentation — a process that may continue slowly for up to a year post-harvest. Aging runs 12–18 months in a mix of 228 L, 350 L, and 600 L neutral barrels (zero new oak purchased since 2019), with no bâtonnage, no fining, and no filtration. The wine is bottled under Diam 30 closure, adopted from the 2022 vintage onward. What no peer in the village does: Dancer refuses all new wood entirely, letting the argilo-calcaire terroir speak without aromatic interference from toasted oak. The 2022 vintage is described as radiant across the domaine's whites — floral, stony, and complex — with the structural cut to develop over a decade.