Barséquanais

Barséquanais is one of two areas that together form the Côte des Bar, centred on the town of Bar-sur-Seine in the southern Aube. Its 33 member villages, all classified autre cru, are strung across five river valleys, the Arce, the Laignes, the Ource, the Sarce and the Seine, in a landscape of rolling hills cut into Kimmeridgian marl and limestone, the same Upper Jurassic bedrock that continues south into the Chablis vineyards. Within this pocket the dominance of Pinot Noir is close to total, the highest concentration of any of the UMC's 17 terroir areas. Chardonnay and Meunier survive only in scattered plots, so almost every vine sunk into this ground is Pinot Noir, grown on soils warmer and drier than the Marne and ripening earlier in the season. The wines that result lean fuller and darker in fruit than the Pinot Noir of the Montagne de Reims, closer in temperament to the still reds the same grape produces a few kilometres south in Burgundy. Essoyes, one of the Barséquanais's 33 villages, was the birthplace of Aline Charigot, who married the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1890. Renoir first rented a house on the edge of the village in 1888 and bought a home there in 1896; for roughly three decades he and his family spent their summers in Essoyes, and he later built a studio at the far end of the garden. Aline died in 1915 and Auguste in 1919, and both, along with their three sons, were buried in the village cemetery; the family home and studio are now open to the public as the Du Côté des Renoir museum. Elsewhere in the Barséquanais, Les Riceys, the largest wine-growing commune in Champagne by area under vine, holds a distinction unmatched anywhere else in the region: it is the only commune entitled to three separate appellations, Champagne, the still Coteaux Champenois, and the pink Rosé des Riceys, a rare still rosé made only from Pinot Noir grown within the commune.