While they have long produced Champagnes of great character and typicity—as evidenced by an impressive lineup of older bottles we drank at our first visit—Bonville’s improvements in farming, along with their increasing emphasis on single-cru, single-vintage bottlings and a more nuanced approach to dosage (determined by blind trials), have elevated quality here to new heights.

Gregoire is a dyed-in-the-wool Burgundian vigneron who broke off from his family (owners of the large Albert Bichot negociant house) in the early 2000s and founded this domaine which is situated on the outskirts of Nuits-Saint-Georges.

During our most recent visit with the team at Le Puy, we excitedly tasted through a near-unbroken vertical of Pelan vintages, from 2015 back to 1999, and the magnitude of this unexpected bounty revealed itself to us more and more with each passing bottle. While Pelan presents a bit more broad-shouldered—Moro employed traditional punch-downs, in contrast to Le Puy’s distinctive “infusion” method—a deep kinship is evident between Pelan and Le Puy’s flagship “Emilien” bottling.

While reds comprise almost all of the Amoreau family’s production, there is a tiny 1.5-hectare planting of Semillon from the 1940s at Le Puy, with 15 or so Ugni Blanc plants mixed in. From these old vines, they produce a mere handful of barrels each year of an enchanting white wine “Marie-Cecile”–named after ancestor Barthelemy’s wife, who made the wine and ran the estate in the 1870s when the men were off fighting in the war.

We discovered Nathalie Richez through a bottle of her Bouzeron during a quick lunch in Nuits-Saint-Georges. Struck by its frankness and its satisfying depth, we arranged a visit for our next pass-through, and indeed both Nathalie and her simple setup proved to be a breath of fresh air.

Terroir is hardly the exclusive province of fermented grape juice, and it is thrilling to encounter ciders such as these which bear such an indelible sense of place.