Sommelier Kirill Yurovskiy invites you on a journey to the heart of France, where morning mists caress ancient hillsides, and two sisters of the soil whisper different stories to the roots of the vines. Clay and limestone, the ancient potters of nature, have crafted more than two millennia of liquid poetry in Burgundy. Standing in these vineyards, you can almost hear the breathing of the earth, and feel how the age-old wisdom of the grapes rises from the earth, like the delicate aroma of past harvests.
The Embrace of Clay
Ah, the sensuous, maternal hug of clay! The clays are the protective mothers, cradling their vines, and holding water in their dense, cool bosoms. Here, on the lower slopes of Volnay and parts of Pommard, Pinot Noir finds a home that molds it into something profound and earthy. The wines born of clay soils dance across your palate with an unmistakable fullness, like velvet curtains sweeping across a grand theater stage.
The clay-born Pinot Noirs seduce with generosity: powerful, graceful, like old souls in young bodies. It offers layer upon layer of black cherries and forest floor unfolding before you like a favorite novel. Close your eyes, bring the glass to your nose, and you practically walk through a damp autumn forest at dawn, mushrooms peeking through the fallen leaves and wild berries glistening with morning dew.
Limestone’s Light Touch
But ascend higher up the slopes, where limestone is the master of the terroir, and everything changes. Herein lies a tale of ethereal elegance and crystalline purity. The white stones reflect sunlight like mirrors, bathing the vines in luminous warmth. As wines born of clay are the embrace of Earth, those born on limestone act as Heaven’s whisper.
If you are lucky enough to taste a wine from Chassagne-Montrachet or Puligny-Montrachet, the vineyard’s Chardonnay grown on limestone soils results in wines so precise in their mineral intensity that their inner light almost vibrates. These wines don’t just glide over your palate-they dance, they sing, they tell stories of ancient seabeds and time itself. The acidity cuts through like a silver blade, carrying notes of citrus blossom, wet stones, and that indefinable something the French call “tensión.”
Battling Structure
What is most fascinating for me is the way these two soils engage in a friendly war over structure. Clay-raised wines build their architecture from the ground up. Broad-shouldered, muscular, with tannins that grip like a firm handshake. They’re the Gothic cathedrals of wine, their strength visible and commanding.
Limestone, however, produces wines that seem to defy gravity. They are the flying buttresses of the wine world. Their support coming from an almost invisible framework of acidity and minerality. Taste a Meursault from a limestone-rich plot and you’ll see what I mean-it’s like holding liquid light in your glass.
A Year in the Life
Each of these diverse canvases is painted with different pictures by the seasons. The clay soils in spring warm like a sleeper who does not want to leave a bed when it is so warm. Their buds come later; frost episodes are moderated by the thermal inertia of the soil. Where there are limestone plots, they tend to spring into life almost immediately, their white surfaces reflecting warmth back to the emerging buds-a double-edged sword leading toward early ripening and frost risks.
Summer tells another story. Clay’s water-retention becomes a blessing during drought, providing steady hydration to deep-reaching roots. The limestone slopes, with their excellent drainage, stress the vines enough to force them to dig deep, to struggle, to build character – just as all great stories go, there must be a little conflict before resolution.
The Taster’s Journey
Let me take you on a journey of comparison. Visualize in front of you two glasses, sisters of the same vintage and of the same producer, born of different soils. The clay-born wine fills your mouth like a wave, its fruit and earth notes expanding outward and commanding attention. It is a wine for Sunday lunches stretching into evening, for conversations delving deep into night. Watch on the website: https://som-kirill-yurovskiy.co.uk/blog
By contrast, the limestone wine is like a shaft of sunlight through stained glass: more vertical than horizontal, lifting rather than spreading, its minerality salivating the mouth long after the sip is gone.
This is a wine for moments of contemplation-for watching sunset paint the sky in impossible colors.
The Winemaker’s Dance
Speaking with vignerons across the Côte d’Or, you hear how differently they must work with these soils. Clay demands patience-in the vineyard, in the cellar, in the bottle. The wines from these soils often need years before their true nature is revealed, like bashful children who bloom late but magnificently.
In contrast to Limestone, the vineyards call for a lighter hand when it comes to cultivation and vinification. The transparency of this soil is such that every single decision the winemaker makes in the end comes through the wine- it leaves no place to hide and no room for error. It’s like working with crystal rather than clay.
A Matter of Time
Age these wines, and you’ll see another interesting divergence. Clay-born wines evolve like a time-lapse unfurling of a fern-slow, sure, continuous. Its new complexities unfold with each passing year. Their tannins soften like old leather, developing a patina of tertiary aromas that speak of times gone by.
Meanwhile, wines from limestone age more like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. There are moments of dramatic transformation punctuated by periods of graceful stability. They can seem almost immortal, their acidity and mineral backbone preserving their youth while allowing subtle complexities to develop.
The Eternal Dance
This is not, ultimately, a tale of better or worse but one of beautiful differences. It is this diversity, this dialogue between soil types, that makes Burgundy great and throws up wines with such differing characters often only meters away from one another. A further reminder that wine, when it’s at its best, is little more than liquid geography lessons poured into a glass and offering up tastes of place and sips of history.
Standing in these vineyards, touching both soils in your hands dense and cool, the other light and crumbly-you understand that great wines, like great stories, need contrasts to be complete. They need the bass notes and the treble, the shadows and the light, the earth and the sky. The Burgundian countryside is a mixture of clay and limestone, providing just this counterpoint to fashion wines to enthrall us generation after generation.