First, you need to figure out which wineries to visit. website Rue des Vignerons An excellent resource for finding visitor-friendly wineries along the Côte de Nuits (and other French regions).
You must make reservations in advance for tastings and/or tours, because if you don’t, you run the risk of showing up with the doors locked. This is what happened to me at a winery called Domaine Joliet, which I passed on my journey. I decided to just drop by (and for my efforts, I enjoyed the lovely view you see above), but no one answered the door when I knocked.
How to choose which one to choose? You can dive deep into wine reviews, choosing wineries with the highest rankings for their products. Or you can tailor your experience while visiting, choosing a winery because it’s housed in a 12th-century building, or another because it’s family-owned, or a third because it makes self-fermented wine. All vineyards in Burgundy would be considered organic farms in the rest of the world because they use no fertilizers, but for self-fermenting wines, no yeast is added to speed up the fermentation process.
Red Pinot Noir is the dominant variety along the Côte de Nuits, but some wineries make white (chardnai) or rosé. Small, colorful drop symbols on the Rue des Vignerons site identify what type of wine each winery makes. If you’re a Chardonnay fan, take the train to Beaune instead to tour the Cote de Beaune—the white wine is the area’s specialty.
Make sure your itinerary is geographically balanced. You’ll want to pick a winery near Dijon, another near Nuits-Saint-Georges, and one of the two to connect the root.
Why Nuits-Saint-Georges? The train station is here, so most winery cyclists make the one-way, 23 km (14 mi) ride there, and then the hourly trains return to Dijon.
If this still seems too complicated, I’ve included a sample itinerary below that you can easily follow.
