Les Champs de l'Abbaye

Domaine Les Champs de l'Abbaye is a small family domaine based in Aluze, in the Côte Chalonnaise, founded by Alain and Isabelle Hasard in 1997. Alain came to wine after working as a sommelier while studying psychology, eventually deciding that he would rather spend his days among the vines than in an office. The estate began with just a few hectares and has remained deliberately small, now working around six hectares of vineyards. The name comes from the cadastral parcel where the family built their home and winery, while the surrounding area has a much longer connection with viticulture, with historical references to vines here going back to the thirteenth century. Alain's family also has strong wine connections elsewhere in France, with his brother running Domaine de la Marfée in the Languedoc.

The domaine sits in the southern part of Burgundy, between Mercurey and Rully, with vineyards primarily in the Côte Chalonnaise and a smaller foothold further north in the Côte de Beaune. The portfolio includes Mercurey, Rully, Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise and Bourgogne, as well as a small amount of Monthélie. This gives Alain and Isabelle the opportunity to work with some very different expressions of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir without needing a large estate. The vineyards are predominantly limestone and clay-limestone, typical of this part of Burgundy, with the combination of soil, slope and exposure giving the wines their balance between fruit, acidity and the mineral character that makes the Côte Chalonnaise so appealing. Their Monthélie holdings, acquired from 2009 onwards, extend the domaine into the Côte de Beaune and add another dimension to the range.

Organic farming has been part of the domaine's identity from the beginning. The official Burgundy wine body records the estate as having turned immediately towards organic cultivation when it was founded in 1997, while other sources note that the vineyards have been organically farmed since 1999 and later achieved certification. The philosophy is straightforward: low yields, careful work in the vineyard and rigorous selection of the grapes are treated as fundamental to quality rather than as optional extras. Harvesting is carried out by hand, and the family places considerable emphasis on sorting the fruit before it reaches the cellar. For a six-hectare domaine, that hands-on approach makes sense: the scale allows Alain and Isabelle to know their individual parcels intimately and to make decisions based on the condition of each vineyard rather than following a fixed recipe across the estate.

In the cellar, the domaine combines traditional Burgundy élevage with a fairly serious approach to maturation. The wines are fermented and raised with the intention of preserving the character of the fruit and the individual vineyard, while oak plays an important role, particularly for the more ambitious cuvées. The estate itself highlights ageing in oak as one of the three pillars of its approach alongside organic farming and low yields, while the reds are handled carefully to retain freshness and finesse rather than simply extracting as much colour and tannin as possible. The result is a range that sits comfortably between traditional and modern Burgundy: recognisably Burgundian, but without trying to turn every bottle into an exercise in expensive oak or excessive concentration.

Pinot Noir is particularly important to Alain Hasard, who has spoken about his preference for the variety over other grapes. That comes through in the estate's red wines, particularly the Mercurey bottlings, where the combination of clay-limestone soils and the Côte Chalonnaise climate gives Pinot Noir a nice middle ground between freshness and ripeness. Wines such as Mercurey Les Marcoeurs and La Brigadière show the range of the estate's red vineyards, while Les Gardes provides another expression from the broader Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise appellation. The whites are equally important, with Rully being a particular strength and Chardonnay also appearing in the Bourgogne and Côte Chalonnaise wines. The estate also produces Crémant de Bourgogne, giving the family another way of working with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

What makes Les Champs de l'Abbaye worth knowing is that it represents the kind of small-scale Burgundy that can easily get overlooked beside the famous Côte d'Or names. There is no huge family history or grand list of prestigious vineyards here. Instead, Alain and Isabelle have spent nearly three decades building a six-hectare domaine around careful farming, low yields and a fairly uncompromising attitude to the quality of the fruit. The wines offer a good way into the Côte Chalonnaise because the estate works across several of the region's key appellations, while the small amount of Monthélie gives a useful comparison with the Côte de Beaune. It is Burgundy without the fuss: small vineyards, organic farming, careful cellar work and wines that let the place they come from do most of the talking.