Five centuries at Magny-lès-Villers

The domaine's own history starts in 1500, with Naudin ancestors working vines at Nantoux. The family was settled at Magny-lès-Villers before 1850. Louis Naudin, raised by an uncle at Ladoix, built the family house at Magny around 1892. His son Henri married Claire Deroye in 1922. She pushed him to plant and buy vines, and wanted him to buy Corton or Aloxe-Corton. He found the trip too far by horse and stayed in the village, buying back some of the land an ancestor had left to the commune.

Their son Henri, born in 1931, made his first wine with his father in 1947, at sixteen. In 1964 he married Liliane Ferrand, from Chamboeuf above Gevrey-Chambertin, and the Henri Naudin-Ferrand label was born. Henri worked on the bid for the Hautes-Côtes appellation, granted in 1961, and chaired its growers' union for about ten years. The domaine says it grew with that appellation. At the end of the 1960s he cleared stony family land at En Bully, where he protected wild orchids, and planted it. That vine gave the first Orchis Mascula with the 1998 harvest.

Claire Naudin

Henri and Liliane had three daughters, Anne, Marie and Claire, and in 1989 Henri was preparing to break up the estate. Claire, the youngest, made the 1991 wines with her father, spent five months in Australia in 1992 and came home that June with an agricultural engineering degree and the national oenology diploma. On 1 September 1993 her father put her in charge of the team. On 1 January 1994 she became manager of the new company, Domaine Henri Naudin-Ferrand, and Henri retired three months later. Liliane retired in 1997, and in 1999 Claire bought her parents' shares and became the company's sole partner. Henri Naudin died in January 2013. Claire's husband, Jean-Yves Bizot, runs his own estate, Domaine Bizot in Vosne-Romanée. The domaine's 2022 history notes that every worker is paid and every vine is rented, from the family or others.

Vines from the Hautes-Côtes to Échezeaux

About 22 hectares are farmed, 80 percent in regional appellations such as the Hautes-Côtes de Nuits and the Hautes-Côtes de Beaune. Lower down, on the Côte, the domaine has Côte de Nuits-Villages at Corgoloin, village Aloxe-Corton and two premiers crus: Ladoix La Corvée at the hamlet of Buisson and Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Damodes. It also has 34 ares of Échezeaux grand cru in the lieu-dit Les Rouges du Bas, which it describes as steep, with 60 centimetres to 1.2 metres of soil over pink limestone. Pinot Noir leads, with Chardonnay, Aligoté, a little Pinot Blanc and Gamay. Claire Naudin wrote in 2018 that she still works Aligoté vines planted by her great-grandparents.

Not certified, by choice

The domaine has chosen not to seek organic certification. Claire Naudin wants to keep the freedom to use a synthetic product at a very low dose if a harvest is at risk. The domaine says the whole vineyard has been treated with organic products since 2019, and chemical weeding stopped in 2020 in favour of managed grass cover and light soil work. It has trialled algae and herbal teas as alternatives to copper and sulphur. In 2022 it bought a new tractor and a crawler to take spraying and ploughing back in-house.

Whole bunches, little sulphur, no pumps

The vat room was redesigned in 1999 so that the harvest is never pumped. The same year the domaine made its first red without added sulphur. Since then, many cuvées have gone into the vat as whole bunches with no sulphur, after strict sorting. No yeasts, enzymes or tannins are added, there is no acidification, and reverse osmosis was tried in 1999 and rejected. The wines stay on their lees without racking after the malolactic fermentation. Fining stopped under Henri Naudin, because it stripped and hardened the wines. Filtration is light or absent, and wine moves by gravity or compressed air. Sulphur is used sparingly during ageing and in a small dose at bottling. Carbon dioxide is kept fairly high in the bottle as protection, so the domaine suggests opening the wines an hour or two ahead, or decanting if the prickle shows. Berry Bros. & Rudd says that without sulphur the stems bring none of their usual harshness, only a floral perfume.

Flower names and the Claire Naudin label

The cuvées named after wild flowers, Orchis Mascula, Myosotis Arvensis, Viola Odorata, Clematis Vitalba, Bellis Perennis and Galanthus Nivalis, are fermented without sulphites, and the domaine calls them nature wines. Its Aloxe-Corton, premiers crus and Échezeaux are fermented the same way. Several flower cuvées are sold under the name Claire Naudin, while the domaine's technical sheets carry the heading Domaine Henri Naudin-Ferrand. All are made in the same cellar. Orchis Mascula is a Hautes-Côtes de Beaune red from several parcels. Myosotis is a Hautes-Côtes de Nuits red from four parcels, and Clematis a Hautes-Côtes de Nuits white from Les Tilles at Magny. Viola Odorata is a Côte de Nuits-Villages from old vines in five lieux-dits at Corgoloin. The Échezeaux is aged largely in new oak, and the domaine suggests waiting ten to fifteen years. The wines above are the domaine's bottles in our cellar. See also our premier cru, grand cru and Burgundy wines pages. Domaine Naudin-Ferrand is not related to Domaine du Clos Naudin in Vouvray.