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Domaine Bruno Clair

AT A GLANCE
Domaine Bruno Clair’s origins are Domaine Clair-Daü, one of the most celebrated domaines in Burgundy from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The domaine is 23 hectares of, well, everything: grand crus, values, rosé, geeky village level, geeky premier crus, and for a predominantly red wine estate, even some Corton-Charlemagne. There is some brilliant genetic material here too as it was from Bruno’s father (as well as from Ponsot) that the Dijon University got many of the cutting that are at the origin of today’s clones. The wines are about delicately extracted fruit on the front palate, backed by serious structure on the mid-palate. If there is one domaine in the Côte de Nuits poised to become (or re-become) a planetary rock star, given the holdings and the talent here, it is this one.
LOCATION: Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Marsannay-la- Côte
SIZE: 23 hectares
GRAPES: Pinot Noir, chardonnay, pinot blanc
VITICULTURE: Lutte raisonnée & organic
WINEMAKING: Natural yeast, some stems, little oak, little extraction.

HISTORY
The origins of Domaine Bruno Clair are those of a domaine now split up, but once one the greatest domaines in Burgundy, the Domaine Clair-Daü, founded by Bruno’s grandparents, Joseph Clair and Marguerite Daü.During WWI, Joseph was an artillery lieutenant in the French army. Before returning to the front in Verdun his regiment was ordered to rest in Dijon where he met nurse Maguerite Daü. Smitten, Joseph promised himself that if he got out of Verdun alive, he would see Marguerite again. They were married in 1919 and Joseph took over the small domaine of 8 hectares in Marsannay that Marguerite had inherited with her sister Hélène.

In the eighteen hundreds, Marsannay, Couchey and Chenôve, had all but abandoned the cultivation of Pinot in favor of the more prolific gamay to quench the thirst for table wine of nearby Dijon which had doubled in size. The three villages grew wealthy on the sales of table wine until the arrival of the railway allowed even more competitively priced table wine from the south of France to reach Dijon. “The commune saw its fortunes steadily decline”, says Remington Norman, “until, by the beginning of the last century, matters had become so serious that the village was reduced within a hair’s breadth of financial ruin. Then, in what amounted to a stroke of marketing genius, a local grower, Joseph Clair, decided that the impetus of a new product was needed. Accordingly, on 22 September 1919, he invented Marsannay rosé. This wine (…) rapidly became the fashionable drink of Dijon café society and its popularity restored the fortunes of the growers and put the village back on the wine map.” This is true but for one embellishment: it wasn’t so much that Joseph Clair was a marketing clairvoyant, but that he decided to make rosé because it could be sold much sooner than red wine – he was in desperate need of cash flow.

Joseph is also credited for the reintroduction of Pinot in Marsannay. Throughout the rest of its history, the Domaine Clair-Daü would have two parallel activities, on the one hand it produced hundreds of hectoliters of quaffable rosé, and on the other, it crafted with great care wonderful wines from the fine vineyards acquired by Joseph, and after him by his son Bernard. The Chambolle purchases began in the thirties, the Gevrey Cazetiers came in 1951, the Gevrey Clos Saint Jacques in 1952, the Savigny Dominodes in 1960, etc… By the fifties, Domaine Clair-Daü was 34 hectares, and it was one of the best estates in Burgundy.

Having passed the reigns to his son Bernard who had started working alongside his father in 1939, Joseph died in 1971. That is when began a family feud resembling what Clive Coates calls “the histrionics of a soap-opera like Dallas.” The Clair children, who in addition to Bruno consisted of his two sisters Noëlle and Monique, “had never got on that well among themselves”, continues Coates, “but the lid on family dissension had been firmly held in place by Joseph, from all accounts somewhat of a Patriarch. Things were not too bad at first but in 1981 the Clair-Daü affair went from bad to worse. Bernard, naturally, wanted to reinvest his profits in the vineyard and in the cellars, to buy new wood and the equipment necessary to control the vinification and maintain the repuration of the domaine. The sisters (…) wanted their money out. Meanwhile, though Bernard, responsible for the vinification, was producing a fine matière première, the élevage in the cellars was increasingly being mishandled by cellar-master M. Ploy. He was nearly always drunk, remembers Bruno Clair (…). Matters reached a head in 1981. In frustration Bernard Clair walked out. In retaliation the sisters boarded up the front door of his house, for it gave on to the courtyard of the domaine (…). [His sister] Noëlle Vernet took over, assisted – if that is the word – by the now incapable M. Ploy. But this was merely a stop-gap. The domaine was up for sale. It was a sad time. The vines were neglected (…). The quality of the wine declined.” And eventually the domaine was split up.

DOMAINE BART: Monique Bart’s share, 25% of the Clair-Daü became Domaine Bart.
MAISON LOUIS JADOT: Noëlle Vernet’s share was sold to Jadot in 1985. In addition Jadot leased Roger Trinquet’s share, thus giving the négociant control over 29% of Domaine Clair-Daü’s vineyards, including the entirety of the Musigny and the Amoureuses.
DOMAINE FOUGERAY DE BEAUCLAIR: Bernard leased his Bonnes Mares to Fougeray de Beauclair.
DOMAINE BRUNO CLAIR: Bernard leased then passed on his vineyards gradually to Bruno. Bruno’s parents divorced, and Genevieve Bardet, Bruno’s mother, also passed her own vineyard, the Clos St Jacques, to her son. Bruno purchased, leased and farmed his own vineyards. 0.43 hectares of the Bonnes Mares leased by Bernard to Fougeray de Beauclair reverted to Bruno in 2006, with balance reverting to him in 2016.

BRUNO CLAIR
If Michel Lafarge, with his snow-white hair, his cavernous voice, and his infinite wisdom, appears to have popped right off a page from the Old Testament, Bruno Clair, with his baritone, his long fight for the recognition of the wines of Marsannay, and his organization of a resistance to the town hall’s plan to destroy vineyards to build developments, could have walked straight out of an Emile Zola novel.

As I take a seat in Bruno’s car, en route to see the vines, Bruno apologizes for his late arrival and for having left me to taste with winemaker Philippe Brun. “I am president of the union [of the growers of Marsannay]. I was handing out yellow cards,” he explains. “We have to tell some growers that if they don’t work their vineyards better there will be consequences. There are 25 growers in the village and generally we all get along. But there are always two or three ‘ayatollahs’ in every community who want to get back at people. We have a few young growers who work very hard, but work alone. On occasion they get backlogged. We have to show a little patience. So I act as a lawyer too.”
“Consequences?” I ask.
“Their wines could be stripped of the appellation”, explains Bruno.

Bruno’s baritone is calm and soothing. His driving is not. He makes a last minute turn narrowly avoiding us crashing into a vineyard wall, mentions nothing about it, resumes: “But a lot of my work consists in fighting the town hall. They want to build developments everywhere. I’ve been opposing it for eight years. But I won’t let it go. I won’t let it go until they stop trying to asphyxiate the first village of the Côte [Marsannay is the first winegrowing village as one exits Dijon]. Did you know that Chenôve once had 250 hectares that were among the best locations in the Côte de Nuits? They were all destroyed in the sixties to make way for developments. We have fought since the fifties for the recognition of Marsannay. I think that with this new generation – the previous one wasn’t the best from a qualitative standpoint – we’re there. The 25 and 35 year olds have made phenomenal efforts. Today we are much better known than our neighbors in Fixin. I won’t have these efforts ruined by urbanization.”

Bruno was born in 1957. “[He] seems so attached to each of his rows of vines”, writes Fiona Beeston, “it seems impossible he should have ever wanted to do anything else but work in wine. When he left high school, however, he refused to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, he set off with two friends to the barren plateau of the Lozère, near the Massif Central, there they spent four solitary years as shepherds.”

In the seventies in France, when one wanted to do something drastic, to make a political statement that rejected capitalism and consumerist society, leaving everything behind to become a shepherd in the Lozère was precisely the thing one swore to do. The promises were always empty however, and it became a running joke. But Bruno actually did it, and for four years nonetheless. That’s a hell of an [expletive] you.

Bruno returned to the family domaine in 1978 but left shortly after, when the family dissensions became unbearable. Over the next five years, he proceeded to build up a 9 hectare domaine of his own. He leased the Savigny Dominodes from his father. He farmed some vineyards in Fixin and Marsannay. And then, for a barely established young winemaker at least, there were somewhat Herculean achievements. “I spent my first years as a vigneron clearing land”, Bruno says. Just above Bonnes Mares, the top section of Morey Saint Denis’ En La Rue de Vergy lay fallow. Bruno purchased the vineyard. Since there was no topsoil, only hard bedrock, he blasted it with dynamite, and with the huge fractured rocks he created an 20 X 20 foot wall to support a terrace on which he planted pinot and chardonnay. Just south of En la Rue de Vergy was some more brush, a small parcel of Chambolle les Veroilles that had lain fallow since phylloxera. After convincing twelve different owners and the commine of Chambolle to sell or rent this land to him, Bruno cleared and planted that too. In 1986, however, when his father retired, the bulk of the great vineyards were passed down to him.

VINES & WINES
“The big screw up [in the sixties and seventies] in the vineyards was potassium”, says Bruno. “Scientists figured out that if you overfed the vines with potassium you would get an additional degree of alcohol. But potassium also fragilized the grapes. That’s how we ended up in the seventies with rot issues like we’d never had before. My father stopped using potassium very quickly. And he never used nitrogen. It also fragilizes the grapes’ skins. He also understood early on the value of using composts. It feeds the vine slowly and you only need homeopathic doses. If you have a dog that is a little bit of a glutton and you give him six pounds of meat, it will eat it. It doesn’t need it. Well the vine is like that dog. So I received a good organic foundation from my father.”

Bernard also left Bruno with some of the best genetic material in Burgundy. It was from the Clair and the Ponsot vineyards that cuttings were taken in the sixties by the University of Dijon to create clones. Some of the most celebrated clones today have their origins in the vineyards of these two domaines.

Even though Bruno says that the term means absolutely nothing, the domaine’s vineyards are for the most part managed en lutte raisonnée. “Like everyone else I did for a time use herbicides but everything is plowed now. I was already more of an adept of copper and sulfur rather than chemicals, but I limit the use of copper because it can asphyxiate the roots. Oidium is easy to treat only with sulfur when there is no rain.” But Bruno also manages 6 hectares in Marsannay organically “to see”. As much as he claims not to be dogmatic, a switch to organic appears to be imminent.

Bruno had met winemaker Philippe Brun in 1979 when Philippe came to work for Bruno’s father. When the estate was divided Philippe went to work first for Drouhin then for Dufouleur. In 1986 when his father retired and Bruno suddenly found himself in charge of 21 hectares he realized he would need help. He asked Philippe to come and join him. Philippe is responsible for the day to day winemaking, but the grandes lignes are decided in what Bruno calls a collegiate atmosphere: “We taste and decide together. We sometimes disagree but we never fight.”

The domaine has always strived for delicacy yet ageability and from the outset the British writers took note. Clive Coates said the domaine was “ a worthy successor to the reputation or Clair-Daü at its best”, while Anthony Hanson wrote “Superb wines are made here. (…) One should buy and try them, from the bottom of the range up.” In the US the reception was lukewarm. Though Matt Kramer wrote very flatteringly of the Dominodes - “beautiful, graceful winemaking is found here” – he must not have been versed in Clair’s Bèze or of his Clos Saint Jacques, and of those he had nothing to say. Parker’s ratings of Clair throughout the eighties and early nineties were mostly in the mid-eighty point range, a death sentence for vineyards of the caliber of Cazetiers, Clos Saint Jacques and Clos de Bèze, or at least a curiosity killer, and consequently, Domaine Bruno Clair was not even on the radar of US collectors until the mid-nineties when the ratings began to climb, and from the 2005 vintage, when they began to soar.

Why is it that the domaine’s wines have soared in popularity? Philippe Brun is left scratching his head. “People used to reproach us some lack of color and power, but our wines aged well.” There is no smoking gun in Philippe’s cellar practices that would explain the domaine’s recent rise in popularity in the US. Pressed a little harder, Philippe does venture that there has been great progress in the vineyards and that he does much less punching down than he did even 4 or 5 years ago. But this is something you will hear around all of Burgundy these days, and it hardly explains the rise of Clair’s specific star. I believe it is really more of a matter of the US changing to find itself in tune with Domaine Bruno Clair, rather than Domaine Bruno Clair changing to find itself in tune with the US. American Burgundy drinkers today are seeking an esthetic that has a lot to do with elegance and less and less with extraction. Domaine Clair’s wines are firmly in the camp of what we shall call ‘structured elegance’, or elegance with a little grrr, they always have been. As a company we couldn’t be more head over heels to represent this domaine.