Clos de Vougeot runs to 50.9576 hectares divided into 134 parcels among some eighty-five owners, of whom around sixty-five bottle a wine. It falls into three bands between the Route des Grands Crus and the top of the slope: gravelly limestone at the top, limestone with gravel and clay through the middle, heavy clay on the flat below. Leroy holds one parcel in each, which is uncommon, and assembles the three into one wine, which is the original Cistercian practice.Hardly an insider knowledge anymore but the upper parcel lies directly behind the château, in the best-drained ground in the Clos, and Leroy works it under métayage, a sharecropping tenancy in which the farmer pays the owner in a share of what the land produces. That is what distinguishes it from a fermage, a straightforward cash rent under which the tenant keeps the entire crop. The fruit from all three parcels is blended before bottling, so the share handed back to the Nourissat family is not a separate lot but the same wine, and it reaches the market under the Christian Nourissat label in the domaine's own heavy bottle.