Lucien Le Moine is a négociant the way a watchmaker is a manufacturer. Since 1999, Mounir Saouma and Rotem Brakin have bought young wine, on its full lees, from around eighty growers along the Côte d'Or, then raised it in their Beaune cellar in lots so small that many cuvées fill a single barrel. A typical vintage amounts to roughly 36,000 bottles spread across some eighty appellations.

The name translates as Lucien the monk, and the method matches. Nothing is racked. Sulfur waits until the very end of élevage, which runs 18 to 24 months; the whites can go a year and a half before seeing any at all. The wines emerge textural, slow to open and unusually long-lived. Critics argue about them precisely because they taste like nobody else's.