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Lieu-dit · Hautvillers

Les Petits Prés

Les Petits Prés is a lieu-dit in Hautvillers, Vallée de la Marne, Champagne, whose largest tier is premier cru.

2.47 ha

delimited

107 m

elevation

10.6 h

sun at harvest

Open on the mapWith the boundary, the plots, the sun through the year and the bedrock.

In figures

LevelPremier Cruinao-aoc-viticoles-bulk (not in this commune)
VillageHautvillers
RegionVallée de la Marne, Champagne
Delimited2.47 hainao-aoc-viticoles-bulk (not in this commune) · cadastre-etalab (4 September 2026)
Planted2.36 hacadastre-etalab (4 September 2026) · ign-bdtopo-vigne (4 September 2026) · ign-rpg-2024 (5 September 2026)
Parcels31
Grape varietypinot noir 41 %, chardonnay 32 %, meunier 27 % also permitted: arbane, petit meslier, pinot blanc, pinot grisinao-cahiers-des-charges (7 September 2026) · dgddi-superficies-produits (7 September 2026) · franceagrimer-observatoire-viticulture (7 September 2026)
Organic0%agence-bio-cartobio (c. 5 September 2026) · agence-bio-operateurs (5 September 2026)

Place in the village

Among the 88 named plots ranked premier cru in Hautvillers, from high to low:

sun at harvest 79
elevation 72
slope 57
on the slope 76

Position

107 m

elevation

10.9%

firm

SSE

south-southeast

foot

concave fold

Elevation107 m 97 to 123 mign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)
Slope10.9% 6.2°ign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)
Aspectsouth-southeast 168°ign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)
On the slope20% foot of the slope, in a concave hollow, 1,267 m drains onto itign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)

Bedrock

youngold
  • 97%Colluvium, mixed slope deposit about 0.1–⁠0 million years
  • 3%Campanian chalk with belemnites 78–⁠72 million years

Not a borehole: ordered by age, thickness by share of surface.

In the glass. As a group, colluvium says little about flavour on its own. In practice the rounder, earlier-approachable wines often sit on the thicker colluvial fans, while tension and ageing potential are more closely tied to slope, soil depth and vine age. (weak indication)

Not a true formation but a collective name for material that has come down from higher up the slope: limestone scree, lumps of marl, clay and loess, worked together by gravity, frost and rainwater. Most of it was deposited during and after the last ice ages, roughly the past hundred thousand years, and the process is still going on. What exactly is in the ground depends entirely on what lies upslope, so the same map colour can mean something slightly different from village to village.

For the vine. Usually loose, stony and deep, so the roots can go far and surplus water drains away quickly. Thanks to the fine material between the stones, colluvium generally holds more moisture in a dry summer than the thin soil on the bare rock above. At the bottom of the slope the deposit becomes thicker and finer, and because of the low position it is cooler and wetter there; where it contains a lot of limestone scree the active lime content can run high.

Characteristic of the mid and lower slopes of the whole Côte d'Or, including the scree fans at the mouths of the combes, as at Gevrey-Chambertin below the Combe Lavaux.

BRGM geological map at 1:50,000. It tells vineyards apart, not plots within a vineyard. The link between rock and taste is indirect: soil depth, water and warmth do the work, and slope, vine age and the cellar do the rest. Units on that map: C, c5b.

brgm-bdcharm50 (4 September 2026)

Sun and horizon

08:17

above the hill

18:55

behind the hill

10.6 h

sun at harvest

1.5 h

lost to the hill

Grey: sun up, but behind the hill or the vineyard's own slope.

Around harvest the sun rises here at 08:17 above the hill and disappears at 18:55 behind the hill: 10.6 hours of direct sun on a clear day. The ridge reaches 13.6° above the horizon to the north-northeast. The relief costs 0.6% of the irradiation from April to October, direct and diffuse together.

Irradiation+2.2% versus flat land 1,014 kWh/m² from April to October, 45% of it diffuseunder the average cloudiness of 2005 to 2023 (PVGIS-SARAH3, EU JRC); direct, diffuse and reflected light togetherign-rge-alti (5 September 2026) · ign-lidarhd-mnh (6 September 2026) · ign-bdforet-v2 (5 September 2026) · jrc-pvgis-sarah3 (10 September 2026)
Open sky98.4% of the sky the slope itself sees; the surrounding relief blocks the restign-rge-alti (5 September 2026) · ign-lidarhd-mnh (6 September 2026) · ign-bdforet-v2 (5 September 2026)
Three reference days and the caveat
risesetsunday
21 June07:0520:3413.5 h16.2 h
20 September08:1718:5510.6 h12.3 h
21 December09:0816:187.2 h8.2 h

Computed from the IGN elevation model at 5 m: horizon in 36 directions up to six kilometres, sun position per minute, angle of incidence on the mean slope. Clear sky, with the tree canopy from the IGN forest inventory as a raised horizon (15 m closed forest, 5 m heath, trees within 60 m ignored), 46% of the far field is forest (BD Forêt), no buildings.

The irradiation loss does include clouds: the average of 2005 to 2023 (PVGIS-SARAH3, EU JRC), not any particular year.

ign-rge-alti (5 September 2026) · ign-lidarhd-mnh (6 September 2026) · ign-bdforet-v2 (5 September 2026)

Air and cold

17 m

above the lowest point

drains away

cold air

a main drain

54.0 ha flows past

Cold air17 m above the hollow, cold air drains awayign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)
Cold air passing through54.0 ha a main drain, mean over the polygon 3.90 haign-rge-alti (5 September 2026)

Planting

N-S

down the slope

1.02 m

between the rows

100%

vineyard in 1950

RowsN-S (177°) down the slope (9°), every 1.02 m, varies by plotmeasured over 1.8 of 2.4 ha plantedign-bdortho (6 September 2026)
Vineyard in 1950100% rows then ran 34° differentlyassessed over 2.2 ha on the 1950-1965 aerial photographign-photos-historiques-1950-1965 (6 September 2026)

Climate over time

19802000202012°14°16°

station CHAMBRECY-CIVC, 150 m, 14.6 km away

raw daily series, not corrected for station breaks

The name

petit
small, the counterpart of grand. Shape and position · Terroirium, Eigen telling over de namen in deze atlas (2026)
pre
meadow. Ground that carried grass before the vines came, or lay beside them. Vegetation · Gérard Taverdet, Noms de lieux de Bourgogne (2007)

This is about the words, not about this plot: the same name can have arisen differently elsewhere.

Who owns land here

0.95 ha of 2.47 ha delimited is registered to a legal entity

  • LVMH MOET HENNESSY LOUIS VUITTON35%
  • EARL BLIARD-LABESTE ET FILS3%
  • private individuals or unknown62%

Private individuals or unknown: 1.52 ha.

Share of the delimited hectares. Only legal entities are public in France; everything else stays unnamed. From the public register of legal entities (DGFiP), as of 1 January 2025. The owner is not always the one who works the vineyard: tenancy is common.

Nearby lieux-dits

In the same village, measured between label points. That does not say which ones border each other; the map shows that.

Where each figure comes from

Classification
The INAO delimitation per denomination, cut against the cadastral parcel. Only the INAO's own plans are legally binding; this map is informational.
Area
Computed on the sphere from longitude and latitude (turf.area), not in Lambert-93. For an appellation this is the union of the INAO polygons across commune boundaries, measured on the unclosed geometry; the fifteen metres used to close the outline for the map are not counted. For a climat it is the union of the cadastral lieu-dit polygons with that name.
Planted
Parcel area times vineyard cover, where cover comes from the IGN vegetation layer supplemented by the agricultural declaration. Checked against the customs harvest declarations: median deviation 5.1 per cent over a hundred appellations.
Elevation
Mean of the elevation-model cells whose centre falls inside the polygon, on a 5 m grid.
Slope
Per-cell slope from the elevation model using Horn's method, then averaged over the cells in the polygon.
Aspect
Vector mean of the per-cell aspect. A plain average would turn north-east and north-west into south.
Sun at harvest
Hours of direct sun on 20 September under a clear sky, with the horizon in 36 directions out to six kilometres and the height of woods and buildings on top of it. Canopy height is measured where LiDAR HD covers the area and estimated from BD Forêt where it does not; the panel states which of the two was used.
Grape variety by appellation
Per appellation and colour the permitted varieties from the approved cahier des charges; per appellation and tier the declared hectares of white and red from the customs harvest declaration (product codes). One colour permitted: the main variety of that colour. Two colours: from 85 percent of the hectares that colour applies, in between it is called mixed. Champagne: the dominant variety from the planted hectares per variety per commune from FranceAgriMer. Per polygon the dominant variety of its parts by area. Derived, not measured: the variety per plot exists only in the customs vineyard register, which is not public. In a two-colour appellation a single plot may carry the other variety. Customs withhold small appellations (statistical secrecy), in which case the split is missing.
Bedrock
The geological unit covering the largest share of the polygon, from the 1:50,000 geological map. At 1:50,000 the map separates one climat from another, but not what varies inside a climat.
Organic
Share of the area certified organic or in conversion, from the CartoBio plot register.