The Monks, the Mill Stream & the Monopole Hand

The story of Clos du Moulin aux Moines begins in the 10th century, when the monks of the Abbey of Cluny became the first artisans of this place — in a Celtic village near Auxey where Burgundian viticulture itself had been born in the 2nd century BC. The monks chose the site with a surveyor's eye: at the junction of a stream — the ruisseau des Cloux — and the combs, the small valleys, that descend toward Auxey-Duresses and Meursault. The stream provided hydropower for a mill; the limestone hills were ringed with prairie; and a long stone wall enclosed three hectares of vines, giving the estate its name. This was never merely a vineyard. It was a complete monastic farm — mill, dovecote, bread oven, dairy, orchard, lodgings — whose multiple activities fed the neighbouring villages and powered the local economy for centuries. In 1650, the monks built the chapel and a dovecote of 500 birdhouses — the number of pigeons being, at the time, a measure of a domaine's power in the region; the nitrogen-rich droppings were collected as natural fertiliser. Both buildings still stand. The cellars beneath date from the 11th and 15th centuries.

Through the Hundred Years' War, the waning of the monastic orders, revolutions in agricultural technique, and the catastrophe of phylloxera, the estate adapted and endured. For more than six centuries it belonged to the Cistercian abbey of Cîteaux, before passing into private hands after the French Revolution. But the modern renaissance dates to 2008, when the Andrieu family became its owners. The Andrieus are not one of those Burgundian families who have worked their vines for five or six generations — they are Auvergnats who never lost an intimate bond with the farming world. Stéphane Andrieu and his wife Grace Léo — a figure of global luxury hospitality — had launched and run the Lancaster and Montalembert hotels in Paris. But the call of the land proved stronger. Stéphane bought the centuries-old domaine and convinced his son Jordane, a thirty-something globetrotter, to unpack his bags in Auxey-Duresses and learn the craft properly, earning his diplôme de technicien en œnologie at the University of Dijon.

From day one, the family farmed organically — the estate was certified by Ecocert in 2012 — and then moved fully into biodynamics, achieving Demeter certification in 2021. In 2009 they appointed Willy Roulendes as winemaker, arriving after years at Domaine de Montille; in 2020, Michael Schwab joined to support the daily work. When Willy arrived in 2008 the domaine had just 8 hectares; it has since grown to 15 hectares across six appellations, yet remains deliberately artisanal — around 55,000 bottles a year, 70% of them exported, with the United States the largest market and Japan the second. The ambition, stated plainly, is to write a new page for this thousand-year-old estate: terroir wines, free from technological gimmicks, certified organic and biodynamic.

Willy Roulendes's cellar philosophy is Burgundian tradition stripped of gimmickry. The reds are vinified mainly in concrete vats, the whites in barrels and foudres — the whites fermenting in 400-litre barrels, with Willy deliberately oxygenating the musts to build stable, reductive-resistant wines. Fermentations start on their own natural rhythm and run 8 to 12 days. For the reds there is a mix of destemming and whole-cluster depending on the cuvée and the year — the Clos du Moulin aux Moines rouge seeing up to 80% whole cluster, the Vieilles Vignes entirely destemmed — with relatively long macerations, always in search of finesse rather than extraction.

Élevage runs 12 to 18 months depending on the appellation and the vintage, in the old cellars beneath the estate. To avoid marking the wines, the domaine holds new French oak to a ceiling of 15% — and Willy has adjusted the élevages of recent vintages to be less oaky than before, a refinement the French wine press has noted with approval. Fining and filtration are avoided as a rule — used only, in Willy's words, "as an intervention" when a wine truly requires it. And for a dash of madness in the classical range, there is the Vin de France Pinot Noir "Nature": vines right in front of the domaine that were never classified (they likely weren't planted when the appellation lines were drawn), vinified entirely in tank, whole-cluster, with no sulphur at all — crunchy, supple, and alive.

What emerges is a range unified by freshness, purity, and a quiet refusal to force. The Auxey-Duresses Clos du Moulin aux Moines Vieilles Vignes is the flagship red — all finesse, elegant oak, juicy matter, long and fresh. The white from the same Clos is wide, melting, and mouth-watering — Meursault's neighbour in glass. The Saint-Romain is direct, intense, and mineral; the Pernand-Vergelesses Les Combottes layered and citrus-ripe; the Volnay Les Famines a wine that, in Burgundy Report's tasting note, "dances over the palate." The Pommard village is a superb exemplar of its appellation; the Beaune 1er Cru Les Cents Vignes the deepest and most cellar-worthy of the reds. And the Bourgogne Clos de la Perrière pair — red and white from the walled Corpeau vineyard — remain among the great value plays of the Côte. This is winemaking in the service of a simple idea: a thousand-year-old vineyard deserves to be tasted, not manufactured.

Clos du Moulin aux Moines is not merely a winery; it is one of the oldest continuously cultivated sites in Burgundy — a place where the entire history of French wine can be read in a single courtyard: Cluny monks choosing a stream junction in 962, Cîteaux's six centuries of stewardship, a 1650 dovecote measuring power in pigeons, Revolution, phylloxera, and finally a Parisian hotelier family who heard the call of the land and answered it with biodynamics. In an era when Burgundy's great addresses sell to luxury conglomerates, the Andrieus represent a different kind of arrival: newcomers who chose an unfashionable village, kept the estate small, and invested in soil rather than signage.

The legacy being written here is one of restoration rather than reinvention. The monks did not need to be taught organic farming; the Andrieus simply removed the 20th century from the equation — chemicals out, horses back, yields disciplined, fermentations returned to their natural rhythm. The conversion was immediate and total: organic from day one, Ecocert by 2012, Demeter by 2021. What changed was only what needed changing — and what was preserved was everything else: the 11th-century cellar vaults, the concrete tanks of the old cuverie, the walled monopoles, the habit of feeding the village. In summer, the courtyard even hosts a temporary restaurant, l'Arrière-Boutique — a faint, cheerful echo of the monastic farm that once fed Auxey-Duresses and Meursault.

The future of the project is bound to the rising fortunes of Auxey-Duresses and the Côte de Beaune's cooler margins — as climate change pushes drinkers toward exactly the freshness these high valleys naturally give, and as discerning buyers hunt monopoles and premier crus beyond the famous postcodes. As the Vieilles Vignes continues to demonstrate that a walled Auxey clos can stand beside far grander names, as Clos Orgelot quietly reintroduces itself to Pommard lovers, and as the Nature cuvée proves that a thousand-year-old estate can still surprise, Jordane Andrieu and Willy Roulendes remain what the monks of Cluny intended: caretakers of a place that feeds people — with wine now, as with bread then — and guardians of a continuity measured not in generations but in centuries. The mill no longer turns, but the stream still runs, the wall still holds, and the wines still speak of this junction of water, stone, and time.