Côte des Bar, Champagne
The Côte des Bar is Champagne's odd one out — geographically, geologically, and even culturally. It sits roughly 90–100 miles southeast of Épernay, closer in actual distance to Chablis in Burgundy than to the heart of Champagne itself, and for a long time, it wasn't even clear which region it belonged to: an internecine dispute between the Marne and Aube départements played out over whether the Aube should be considered part of Champagne or part of Burgundy at all.
The wine history here is genuinely old, and it has a distinctly Burgundian origin story. Vines have grown here since Roman times, but it was in 1116 that Saint Bernard, a monk from Cîteaux Abbey near Clos Vougeot in Burgundy, revitalized the vineyards and built up serious wine production at Clairvaux Abbey. Bernard is credited with introducing Morillon Noir — an ancestor of Pinot Noir — to the region in the 1100s, a direct transplant from Burgundian soil that's shaped everything that's grown here since.
That Burgundian connection isn't just historical — it's geological. The Aube's soils are Jurassic, formed 145 to 200 million years ago, considerably older than the Cretaceous chalk that defines the rest of Champagne, and they're Kimmeridgian — the exact same marl of limestone and clay found in Chablis. The Côte des Bar is, in fact, about a half-hour's drive closer to Chablis than to Reims. That shared subsoil gives the region's wines a different character entirely: voluptuous fruit balanced against bright acidity, with a warmer climate meaning less astringency and less need for dosage than Champagne's cooler northern vineyards typically require.
Despite sharing Chablis's soil, the Côte des Bar didn't follow Chablis into Chardonnay — it went the opposite direction. Pinot Noir dominates here, covering 82–84% of plantings, mostly because the region's relative warmth suits the grape so well. For most of its history, that Pinot Noir served a fairly invisible purpose: the Côte des Bar supplies about 23% of all Champagne's grapes — and over half the region's total Pinot Noir — most of it shipped north to the big houses for blending, with the Aube's own name rarely appearing on a bottle. Under the old échelle des crus ranking system, none of the Aube's villages were ever granted Grand Cru or Premier Cru status, which only reinforced its reputation as Champagne's overlooked supporting cast.
That's changed substantially over the past two decades. A growing number of independent vignerons in the Côte des Bar are now bottling under their own labels, focused on site-specific expression rather than anonymous bulk supply, and many trained in Burgundy and bring its single-terroir, varietal philosophy back home with them. One village stands out specifically: Les Riceys is the largest wine-growing village in all of Champagne, and the only one entitled to three separate appellations — Champagne, Coteaux Champenois, and the celebrated Rosé des Riceys, a still rosé made entirely from Pinot Noir.
For BoundbyWine, the Côte des Bar tells one of Champagne's best underdog stories: a region long treated as an anonymous grape-supply zone for bigger houses up north, now home to some of the most exciting small, independent, terroir-focused growers in the entire appellation.
In this collection you'll find Pinot Noir-driven Champagnes from the Côte des Bar — fuller, fruitier, and often better value than their northern counterparts, made by a new generation of growers finally putting the region's own name on the label
