Producer deep dive
Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey and the rise of Saint-Aubin
Pricing analysis of the modern cult producer from Burgundy.
A bottle of Montrachet from Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey costs around 3,500 euros. A bottle of his Saint-Aubin premier cru, pressed in the same cellar, aged in the same kind of barrel, sealed with the same wax, costs under 200. The two wines are not equals. But the gap in price is far wider than the gap in pleasure, and that gap is the reason Saint-Aubin has gone from Burgundy's afterthought to one of the most useful names on a wine list.
In barely two decades, Colin-Morey has moved from his father's cellar to the front rank of white Burgundy, spoken of alongside Leflaive and Roulot. Followed against a like-for-like basket of white Burgundy over the past fifteen years, his own bottles have pulled steadily away from the pack, and the widening shaded gap in the chart below is the premium the market now pays for his name. His roots are in Saint-Aubin, the appellation his family helped build and that he has done as much as anyone to make fashionable. To understand why his wines are worth seeking out, and why Saint-Aubin is the value play in a region with very few left, it helps to start with the man.
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01Who is Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey
Pierre-Yves Colin is the eldest son of Marc Colin, whose domaine sits in Saint-Aubin. He made the wines there from 1994 until 2005, a decade-long apprenticeship in his own backyard. In 2001, with his wife Caroline Morey, daughter of the Chassagne winemaker Jean-Marc Morey, he started a small negociant business buying grapes from growers he trusted. After the 2005 harvest he left the family estate, taking with him roughly six hectares of inherited vines in Saint-Aubin and Chassagne, and from the 2006 vintage the wines appeared under his own name.
The operation today runs to about thirteen hectares, part owned and part bought-in, spread across the best white-wine addresses of the Cote de Beaune: Saint-Aubin, Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, up to Corton-Charlemagne and the Montrachet grand crus. Around nine bottles in ten are Chardonnay. Where he buys fruit rather than growing it, he supplies the barrels and keeps only the wines that meet his standard, ageing them in the cold cellar beneath his house in Chassagne. His two sons, Mathis and Clement, have joined him; Caroline now makes her own wines under a separate label from the same building. The reputation, built quietly and quickly, is now firmly that of a benchmark.
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02A recognisable style
To understand how Colin-Morey makes wine, it helps to know what frightened him. From the mid-1990s, white Burgundy was struck by premature oxidation, an epidemic of bottles turning deep gold and tasting tired years, sometimes a decade, before they should have. No producer was wholly spared, and the causes were never pinned to one thing. Much of what makes a Colin-Morey wine recognisable is a deliberate answer to that problem.
He stopped stirring the lees, the technique that adds breadth but also exposes a wine to oxygen, and he stopped heating his cellar to push the wines through their secondary fermentation. He ages the wines long, the Saint-Aubins for around a year and the rest up to eighteen months, in 350-litre barrels that are larger than the standard Burgundian cask, with only a small fraction of new oak. The bigger barrels and the restraint with wood leave less of an oak imprint and more tension and freshness in the glass. The grapes are pressed whole and at higher pressure than most, drawing out the compounds that give the wines their texture and their stamina. Fermentation runs on wild yeasts, and the wines are bottled without filtration.
Then comes the part you can see. Every village, premier cru and grand cru bottle is closed with an extra-long, extra-wide untreated cork and capped with a disc of soft wax, a belt-and-braces defence against air. The wax top is the giveaway on a shelf. Inside is a wine built to a consistent signature: citrus and crushed stone, a flick of smoke or gunflint, saline length, richness without weight, and the structure to age a decade or more. It is reduction kept on a leash, and it is why collectors trust the wines to last.
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03The rise of Saint-Aubin
Saint-Aubin is easy to miss, which for a long time was its problem. The village sits in a side valley behind Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet, one ridge back from the famous slope. Walk west over the hill from the grand cru Chevalier-Montrachet and you drop down into Saint-Aubin's En Remilly, planted on the same band of marl. The vineyards are higher and cooler than those of its neighbours, between 300 and 400 metres, and for most of the last century that was a liability: the grapes struggled to ripen, and the wines were rustic reds made from Pinot Noir and a good deal of Aligote.
Several things turned the appellation around. In the 1980s, growers replanted the Puligny-facing sites that had been abandoned after phylloxera, and the quality of fruit from that ground became impossible to ignore. As the prices of Puligny, Chassagne and Meursault climbed, Saint-Aubin's growers switched decisively to Chardonnay. The classification helped the story: Saint-Aubin was granted its premier crus in 1977, three years ahead of its grander neighbours, and nearly three-quarters of its vineyards now carry premier cru status. Climate change did the rest, turning the cool, late-ripening slopes from a weakness into an asset, giving the wines freshness at a moment when buyers had tired of weight and wanted precision instead.
The critics caught up. By 2016 Jancis Robinson was arguing that the appellation, once treated as plainly inferior to Meursault, Puligny and Chassagne, should be seen as close to their equal. Rajat Parr has called it the insider's white Burgundy. Colin-Morey, with his father's domaine and his own beginnings rooted in the village, sits at the centre of that re-rating, alongside names such as Hubert Lamy. His Saint-Aubins now fetch serious money. They are also, measured against what he and everyone else charges next door, a bargain.
That pull-away is not the work of one flagship wine. Tracked cuvee by cuvee, the same climb runs right through his range, and the Saint-Aubins (in red) are among the steepest risers of all, the late-blooming village keeping pace with, and often outrunning, its grander neighbours.
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04Where the outperformance lives
Price is only half the story; the other half is how hard each wine has worked. The chart below measures every Colin-Morey cuvee against its own benchmark, the broad market for the same appellation over the same fifteen years, so a Saint-Aubin is judged against Saint-Aubin as a whole and a Meursault against Meursault. A reading of one times means the wine merely kept pace with its neighbours; anything above one means Colin-Morey pulled ahead.
By that measure his Meursault Perrieres is the standout, returning almost six times what the wider Meursault market did, while his grand cru Batard-Montrachet barely edged its appellation. His two Saint-Aubins sit in between at close to twice the local market. That is the quiet point of the whole range: even the village's wines, in the right hands, have behaved like blue-chips rather than bargains, and they still cost a fraction of the grander names.
There is a timing point too. Burgundy prices ran up sharply into 2022 and have since come off the boil, a correction covered in more detail in the state of fine wine, and recent Saint-Aubin premier cru vintages, En Remilly and Les Champlots among them, have eased back from their 2022 peak; the village bottlings, such as Le Banc, have held closer to their highs. For a buyer, the softer premier cru pricing is the opportunity rather than the warning. Saint-Aubin has recovered to the edge of its famous neighbours in quality and reputation, but the premier cru and grand cru rungs above it still belong to a different world of money.
Saint-Aubin will never be Montrachet. But from the right producer it offers the same address next door, much of the same pleasure, and the structure to reward a few years in the cellar, for the price of a village wine. For anyone learning white Burgundy without a banker's budget, it is the most useful bottle on the list, and Colin-Morey is the surest place to start.
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The return multiples above are indicative, derived from Wine-Searcher monthly averages (ex-tax) and rounded, and remain subject to verification; actual returns vary by vintage, condition and merchant.
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