Domaine Bruno Clair was built from the wreckage of one of Burgundy's great estates. When the legendary Clair-Daü was broken up following family disputes in the mid-1980s, Bruno managed to recover the most important parcels, including Clos de Bèze, Clos Saint-Jacques and Bonnes-Mares, and fastidiously set about rebuilding. What he has constructed over four decades is a domaine that now ranks among the most consistent and compelling addresses in the Côte de Nuits. Today the estate is transitioning to the next generation: sons Edouard and Arthur have taken on the farming and winemaking, with Edouard leading in the vineyard and Arthur in the cellar.
The farming is organic and the work is exacting. Yields are kept low through careful work in the vines, harvesting is by hand, and fermentation proceeds on indigenous yeasts in open wooden vats. Whole clusters have become increasingly important under Edouard and Arthur, typically running between twenty and fifty percent depending on the vineyard and the vintage, with the stalks doing the structural work that in lesser hands gets pushed onto the oak. New oak is modest even at grand cru level, rarely exceeding forty-five percent, and the wines spend eighteen to twenty months in a mix of barriques and larger foudres before bottling unfined.
The 2022 harvest began on the 25th of August and progressed with unusual calm. "It didn't feel like a hot harvest and we had time to pick precisely," Arthur recalled after the vintage. "We had a good-sized team and not a lot of sorting to do." Yields ran to thirty to thirty-two hectolitres per hectare, low but substantially better than the frost-affected harvests of 2021 and 2020. The malolactic fermentations completed quickly, within days in some cuvées, and the wines opened up through the winter in barrel with a clarity and precision that prompted Arthur to describe them as among the best of recent years.
The range spans the full length of the Côte de Nuits, from Marsannay to Bonnes-Mares and Clos de Bèze. Three vintages across several cuvées, from a domaine at the top of its form.