Caught Somewhere in Time: Clos de Tart 1887-2016

BY NEAL MARTIN | FEBRUARY 20, 2019

Imagine that Burgundy’s 635 premier and 33 grand crus were a sea of monopoles: one vineyard per owner, not unlike Bordeaux. It would make life much simpler. Tasting the new vintage from barrel would be a few laps around the track instead of an ultra-marathon without a finish line. Then again, you know as well as I do that this sacrilegious dumbing-down would deprive Burgundy of its natural ability to translate an intricate jigsaw puzzle of topography, soil and bedrock into a kaleidoscopic array of wines in our glass. Burgundy’s complexity might be frustrating, but it is an endless source of fascination, a cryptic crossword that you can imbibe and savor. 

Of course, there are vineyards owned by a single producer, more than you might presuppose. There are eight grand cru monopoles within the Côte d’Or if we are pedantic and include Rousseau’s Clos des Ruchottes. Many would cite Romanée-Conti as the most famous. However, if somebody asked me to name an archetypal monopole, I would choose the largest, Clos de Tart. Unlike Romanée-Conti, the crown jewel within a portfolio, Clos de Tart stands alone insofar as there are no sibling vineyards elsewhere under the same ownership. Even the winery lies within the boundaries of the monopole, heightening self-containment and solipsism, as if Clos de Tart has always cut itself off from the outside world. Passersby can only speculate what is happening behind the seemingly impenetrable ochre façade that dominates the epicenter of Morey-Saint-Denis, its inner sanctum sealed away from prying eyes. To cap it all off, Clos de Tart is veiled in timelessness. It has existed as an immutable cornerstone within the Burgundy landscape since medieval times, its wine as popular in the time of the Knights Templar as in the time of Brexit.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to participate in three or four verticals of Clos de Tart. I’ve visited countless times, even dropped in during a family vacation with infant daughters in tow (evidence below). Yet I had never undertaken a comprehensive tasting that spans decades until Jordi Oriols-Gil organized a unique retrospective covering more than 50 years at Ten Trinity in London. Frédéric Engerer, responsible for François Pinault’s estates, flew over especially for the event, which was doubtless a learning experience for him as much as anyone else. To be honest, nobody knew quite what to expect in these uncharted waters. Ancient vintages are rarely seen and do not enjoy strong repute. The consensus is that winemaker Sylvain Pitiot brought long-overdue improvement, though even his wines stand accused by cognoscenti of being picked too late. What transpired was a tasting that overturned some of my preconceptions and forced me to look at Clos de Tart in a different way. It revealed monumental highs, head-scratching lows and everything in between.

History

Burgundy is steeped in history, yet few estates can match Clos de Tart. One must flick back the history pages almost an entire millennium to reach its formation, and throughout its life there has been remarkable continuity, with just four proprietors since the 12th century. 

Clos de Tart was first recorded as “Climat de Forge” in 1141, when the winery, along with its leviathan pressoir à perroquet (parrot press) and vines, was sold to the sisters of Abbé de Tart-le-Haut in Genlis. The Bernadine nuns were part of the Cistercian brotherhood based in Cîteaux. Jasper Morris MW, writing in Inside Burgundy, states that the Knights Hospitaller de Brochon were the benevolent vendors, and as their name implies, the sale included additional land in Brochon just north of Gevrey.

The nuns augmented their initial five-hectare holding with acquisitions in 1240 and rebranded as Clos de Tart upon gaining the rights to harvest before, during or after the ban de vendanges. The aforementioned pressoir à perroquet remained operational from 1590 until 1924, by which time one assumes its warranty had expired. With all its ropes and pulleys, it is a remarkable piece of engineering that must have looked like something out of a Tolkien fantasy when operational. (According to Andrew Jefford, it is one of only three that remain. One is at Domaine Joseph Drouhin, but I could not discover the location of the other.) Eventually the sisters were relocated to Dijon by papal decree, an act that I’m sure they were not happy about. Alas, equal rights were not an ecclesiastical strong point back in those days.