Nicolas Faure

There’s a little bit of paneling in Nicolas Faure’s garage, with all his harvest dates marked out in chalk going back to his first ever vintage in 2011, when he embarked on this exciting venture. It’s a symbolic image as this estate is about as artisan and as rarefied as is possible. Below the garage and indeed below his house, too, where he lives with his growing family, Nicolas has a compact and bijou cellar, in which he houses the handful of barrels containing his precious bounty.

Between 2006 and 2015 he gained valuable experience working at domaines in Burgundy, the Rhône Valley and New Zealand, culminating in a spell at a small domaine in Vosne-Romanée called DRC. Whilst there, he began on his side project, acquiring a nice plot of Nuits-Saint-Georges (Herbues) to the north of the village, on the Vosne side. He bottled around three barrels of 2011 under his own label, and was up and running.

Over the next couple of years, he found some other small, interesting parcels, which he integrated into his portfolio from 2013. He now produces around 6000 bottles annually, nature permitting! Although with some of his wines he only produces one barrel, which is not much for the entire world! He farms organically and uses minimal sulphur, but it would be wrong to categorise these as natural wines in the modern vernacular, though they experience only minimal intervention. All the reds are 100% whole bunch.

He has quickly built up a strong global following for his wines, which are almost impossible to find on the market. He has no real plans to expand significantly, so that is unlikely to change. We appreciate how lucky we are to get to distribute his wines here in the UK. Married to Amélie Berthaut of Domaine Berthaut Gerbet, he now works at her domaine in Fixin most of the time, and one imagines well into the evenings on his own wines back at the family home in the Hautes Côtes de Nuits. His wines are very easy to love, and he is always interesting to listen to, his passion for his métier seeping from his pores.

Inquisitive and questioning, he is always keen to push boundaries and this year, for the first time, I got to taste his new Riesling, of which 2022 is the inaugural vintage.