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We meet Claire at her Clematis vineyard in Hautes-Cotes-de-Nuits, a vineyard somewhat hidden away in comparison with the highly visible vines of the main slopes, and a place where she feels free to experiment. She’s highly passionate about sustainability – the environment of course – but also the wider ability of vignerons to pass on their profession to future generations.

Claire explains how she became so interested in finding new and better ways to make traditionally styled wines:

“My grandfather’s generation was killing themselves for small crops. It was very hard work. Then my father wanted to go to something efficient and sustainable, so they started spraying and using tractors. For 40 years it worked – every year they could produce a lot of wine.

“Then my generation realised we were polluting water and contaminating ourselves. One of our friends when I was 25 had a brain tumour and died. My husband’s father was a doctor, so he started to study the problem, and realised that brain tumours were much more common in viticulture than average. To me, that was the sign that we were wrong.

“A few years later, I became extremely allergic to chemical sprays. That’s what saved me. I said ‘OK, we will stop this. We are killing ourselves. We are killing other people. We are killing our children.”

For Claire, this meant organic farming with very low intervention, and constantly looking for ways to improve.

“20 years ago, Jean-Yves (Bizot – Claire’s husband) and I were considered unrealistic. People would say that you can’t feed the planet with organic farming, but I at least wanted to try. It doesn’t have to be a brutal change. It took me 20 years to reach the balance of today.

“It’s like fighting against spring frost. You will see beautiful pictures of candles in the vineyard, but to me it’s a nonsense, because what avoids frost damage also creates it. It’s an instant solution – you try to warm up the buds, but it’s not a solution for the future. To me the solution must be agronomical, and this means for example prune later, so that when it’s cold the buds are still resistant to frost. Not cultivate the soil too early, because this warms the earth, and the plants start earlier. And probably we must imagine other solutions of this category that are not producing CO2.”

Claire’s Hautes-Cotes-de-Nuits vineyard has an unusual layout. Her vine rows are separated by 3 metres instead of the traditional 1, and her vines are trained far higher off the ground.

The benefit of this is that the vineyard becomes much easier to work, and the active parts of the vine are much further away from the ground, which reduces disease. Planting the vineyard is cheaper, and tractors can run through the land much more easily, reducing fuel use.

This reduces yields per hectare of land by 10%-20%, but production costs are also lower and security against adverse weather is higher. This vineyard has several times survived frost damage while all around have lost their crops.

The rest of Burgundy isn’t following yet, but it can only be a matter of time considering how good her wines are. According to Claire, the region “has a problem, which is the weight of tradition. People are afraid of change.”

“But just consider what is being done everywhere in the world apart from Burgundy. Everyone is planting low density. It is just technically obvious. Either you watch the future or the past. You are free to make your own decision.”

At first, she worried about the consequences of her approach. After all, if she intervened as little as possible and allowed the weather and terroir to express themselves, her wines would taste very different from one year to the next.

Yet, as Claire puts it, “it was too strong in my philosophy. I think my customers have understood this and it is not a problem. In fact, probably the contrary.”

…we agree.