Pierre-Olivier Garcia

The domaine was formerly known as Moron-Garcia (up to and including the 2019 vintage), as Pierre-Olivier Garcia and Mathieu Moron set up the business together as partners. But Mathieu has a separate full time wine job and so from 2020 the label changed to Pierre-Olivier Garcia. He comes from a gifted family – his father Jean-Pierre Garcia is a distinguished academic who has played an important role in the setting up of the Climats de Bourgogne.

The domaine has just one hectare of vines, made up from five different plots, supplemented by the equivalent of a further 4.5ha of purchased grapes.

Since 2019 the vinification formula has been to work with one third destemmed grapes, one third whole bunches and one third using the incredibly labour intensive system of destemming the grapes by hand, berry by berry, or in French baie-par-baie. Pierre-Olivier sets enormous store by this, a technique I first encountered at Domaine de la Vougeraie for their Musigny.

What does it mean, in practice, in terms of the taste of the wine? Something which I have found fairly consistently in these wines, and which Pierre-Olivier thinks is directly attributable to the berry-by-berry system, was a heightened volatility, yet in a way which can be taken as a positive – at least once one has become attuned to it. These volatile aromas stop well short of acetate, which I would certainly consider to be a fault, and instead enhance the positive nature of the aromatics.