THE STORY
Letting Puligny Speak
In Puligny-Montrachet, the great vineyards almost never change hands. The village sits on a slope of just over two hundred hectares, and what is on it has been on it, in the same families, for generations. For a serious new domaine to take root here is rare. For one to do so with privileged access to some of the appellation’s most coveted parcels is rarer still. That is the project Alvina Pernot and her husband Philippe Abadie have been building since 2018.
Alvina is the granddaughter of Paul Pernot, who has farmed in Puligny since 1955. The family is the second-largest holder of vines in Puligny after Domaine Leflaive, and the largest single owner of Les Folatières, including the walled Clos des Folatières monopole. For decades, more than half of what those vineyards produced left the village in bulk, sold historically to Joseph Drouhin and bottled under other labels. The terroirs were there, though in many cases the bottled expression of them was not. What Alvina has been doing since 2018, parcel by parcel and vintage by vintage, is bringing that fruit home.
Alvina grew up in Puligny. She studied law at university before turning to wine, taking an agricultural training qualification at the CFPPA in Beaune, with internships at Domaine François Carillon and a vinification spent at Joseph Drouhin, before joining her father at Domaine Paul Pernot in her early twenties. She worked there for nearly five years. Within two and a half of those, she understood that her ideas were welcomed at the kitchen table and not yet welcomed in practice. Her grandfather was still at the helm. Her father and uncle worked below him. A young woman with views about picking dates and élevage was not going to redirect a working domaine of that size. The conversations with Philippe began at home, evening after evening, around what was beginning to feel like a real possibility: the family was selling more than half of its harvest to négoce, and that fruit could be vinified differently. They could make wines of their own. The thought, once it had been said aloud, was not going to be unsaid.
Philippe is the unusual ingredient. He did not grow up on a vineyard, though four generations of wine sit behind him. His great-grandfather was a négociant in Algeria; his grandfather rebuilt the family business in the south of France after their return; his father moved to Burgundy in a commercial role, and Philippe grew up in the Côte de Beaune surrounded by the trade rather than the vines.
He learned cellar work in shorter spells across several houses, including with Françoise et Denis Clerc in Saint-Aubin, with Henri Boillot through his son Guillaume, and at Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat with Charles Van Canneyt. He arrived at the project with the technical confidence of someone who had watched many cellars, and the outsider’s freedom to ask why things were done the way they were. That second quality has mattered at least as much as the first.
The opening came in 2017. A village parcel, La Rue aux Vaches, sitting just below the premiers crus Clos des Meix and Les Pucelles, came up for sale. Domaine Paul Pernot had farmed it for years, and Alvina knew the wine well. She and her father bought it together. The first vintage followed in 2018: eight cuvées, six thousand bottles, vinified at the family domaine and aged in a small cellar beneath Alvina and Philippe’s house. The mood around the project was, on her father’s side, benevolent but watchful. In a wine-growing family of that generation, a daughter was not assumed to take over an agricultural estate, and Alvina had been steered, gently, towards law. She is also an only child, which meant the question was never really one of inheritance. It was whether the work itself was the life she wanted. She knew it was the moment they began.
For the first three vintages her father held his counsel, waiting to see whether the wines would prove themselves. The recognition came first from outside the village: from journalists, from sommeliers, from old friends in the trade who started telling him about his daughter’s wines before he had really sat with them himself. From the 2020 vintage onwards, he began asking to come down to the cellar before bottling. He drinks their wines today. He also tells them, with the warmth of a Burgundian father who cannot quite resist, that his are better. The truth is that the two styles have grown apart, in the most generous sense of the phrase. Father and daughter, working some of the same parcels, no longer make wines that mirror each other, and that is exactly as it should be.
They would rather a taster recognise the purity and precision of a Puligny terroir than the hand of the vigneron.
Everything they do, from the picking dates and the cuverie to the choice of cork, is in service of that single ambition. The technique exists to serve the terroir.
The 2025 vintage is where the domaine arrives at the form Alvina and Philippe have spent close to a decade building towards. Just over three hectares of vines now sit under their full management, and roughly nine-tenths of the range comes from family or domaine parcels, from Bourgogne Côte d’Or to Grand Cru. Only a handful of must exchanges remain, and only because Alvina and Philippe love what they bring to the range. The range tightens to twenty-two cuvées, and four new village Puligny lieux-dits step forward under their own names for the first time. Close to ten years of work, and 2025 is the first vintage where the cellar holds exactly what the field gave them. 2025 is the closest they have come.
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