The 64th Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges wine auction takes place on Sunday 9th March 2025 at Château du Clos de Vougeot. For the first time, the auction will be organised by iDealwine, France’s leading wine auction house and a global leader in online wine auctions. The wines from the 2024 vintage have turned out to be of high quality. There’s just one problem – there’s not much of it due to low yields. To add an additional incentive to take part in the auction, bottles from older vintages will also be going under the hammer on the day.
A new auctioneer at the helm: iDealwine
The directors of the Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges have chosen a new auctioneer to organise their annual auction during which the estate’s wines are sold. Bringing down the hammer in 2025 will be iDealwine.
The iDealwine Group is France’s top wine auction house, via its subsidiary International Wine Auction (IWA). The website, created in 2000, has become a global leader in online wine auctions. 65 employees specialised in fine wine are spread between offices in France (Paris, Beaune, and Bordeaux), Hong Kong, Singapore and New York.
The auction will be led by Cyrille Jomand, Ceo of iDealwine, accompanied by Alexandre Giquello, IWA’s partner auctioneer.
“The money raised at the wine auction goes directly to the Hospices and finances local investment projects”, explains Guillaume Koch, Director of the Hospices Civils de Beaune. “At the end of 2024, we started a new rehabilitation programme at the Nuits-Saint-Georges site despite the different problems we had been facing. Thanks to our perseverance and the funds raised at the auctions, we are able to maintain our momentum”.
“It’s an honour for iDealwine to organise the auction and the whole team enthusiastically jumped into the project. What better way to celebrate our 25th anniversary than to help reveal “Burgundy’s best kept secret” to the world?”, adds Cyrille Jomand, Ceo of iDealwine and certified auctioneer
A quality vintage that’ll be rare
The 64th edition of this auction is dedicated to the 2024 vintage, a superb year with wines typical of the Burgundian style – balanced and full of finesse, bringing together great purity, freshness, intense fruitiness and a beautiful silkiness. The vintage will go down in history due to the low amount of grapes harvested.
The average yield across the estate was 9.5hl/ha in 2024 whereas this figure is normally around 30hl/ha. Only 36.5 pièces – or barrels – were produced, filled with 15 different wines. Each barrel will be put up for auction, allowing buyers to boast that they own a barrel of wine. A pièce holds 228 litres of wine, which is equivalent to about 288 bottles.
The charity pièce in aid of the association Coucou nous voilou
Following tradition, a charity pièce – or pièce de charité in French – is sold in aid of another charitable cause. And for the first time, the wine will be a white one, more specifically Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru Les Terres Blanches. It’s a rare wine from the appellation as Chardonnay is only planted on about 5% of it. Buying this pièce works a little differently as it is not sold through the auction so to speak but rather, buyers register for bottles, with the money raised going to the association Coucou nous voilou in 2025.
Founded by Marc Salem, the charity works to brighten the lives of children and teenagers in hospital through trips, games, murals, etc. At the auction, it will be represented by French actress and comedian Chantal Ladesou and champion figure skater Philippe Candeloro.
64th Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges auction: bottles from older vintages auctioned for the first time
To compensate for the small number of barrels up for auction this year, 240 bottles and 120 magnums of different wines produced by the Domaine des Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges will also be auctioned for the first time. Coming from vintages from 2005 to 2017, the wines will be split into lots of 1, 2, 3 or 6 bottles.
The auction will take place at Château du Clos de Vougeot, Burgundy, but buyers will also be able to place bids through the Drouot Live website. The auction is open to private individuals and professionals alike, with anyone wishing to take part needing to register online before Thursday 6 March.
Bidders, who can group together to buy a pièce, will need to entrust the lots they win to a Burgundian wine merchant who will mature the wine (the catalogue lists participating merchants). Once the wine has finished ageing, it is bottled and delivered to the owners.
About the Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges
The Domaine des Hospices de Nuits-Saint-Georges covers 12.4 hectares, dispersed through the communes of Nuits-Saint-Georges, Premeaux-Prissey, Vosne-Romanée and Gevrey-Chambertin. 17 fine red Nuits-Saint-Georges wines are produced, in eight village level parcels and nine Premier Crus including the Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru ‘Les Didiers’ monopole appellation. Offering a wide range means both the enthusiasts who prefer fine, elegant wines and the collectors who seek more structured, powerful wines are satisfied. There is also a well-balanced and fine Gevrey-Chambertin village level wine and finally, one white Nuit-Saint-Georges Premier Cru, a very small, boutique production Chardonnay boasting floral and fruity aromas, with more roundness than minerality on the palate.
