VOLNAY, France — Whenever I am asked to recommend a red Burgundy, I issue a gnomic utterance: “Volnay.” It hardly suffices. But the fact remains that if you know nothing about Burgundy — which is treacherous, given its prices and variability — you can do no better than to scan a wine list or a retail shelf looking for Volnay.

The reason is simple, and that’s a word rarely applied to Burgundy: Volnay is unusually small. It counts just 323 residents. Its vineyard area is little bigger, with just 527 acres. But here’s part of the secret: 54% of Volnay’s vineyard area is officially categorized as premier cru, a lofty rank. Only grand cru exceeds it, and only a mere handful of vineyards worldwide are awarded that exalted status.

The other key to Volnay’s unusual reliability is its cadre of exceptionally high-minded growers. Many Burgundy villages suffer a undertow of reputation from low-achieving growers who overcrop their vines (less is more with pinot noir), and consequently make mediocre wine. Since these slackers are legally entitled to slap the village name onto their bottles, their wines sully their neighbors’ reputations.

This is why Guillaume d’Angerville can sometimes seem slightly apprehensive. Mr. d’Angerville, 50, inherited one of Volnay’s greatest properties, the Domaine Marquis d’Angerville, upon the death of his father in July 2003. He not only got the nobility title, which he doesn’t use — “It won’t even help me get a table in a Paris restaurant” he said — but also an exceptionally lovely manor house and parcels of some of the choicest vineyards in Volnay: Caillerets, Taillepieds, Champans, and the most dazzling jewel of all, the entire 5.3 acres of the Clos des Ducs vineyard, which is arguably Volnay’s single greatest site.

That someone such as he could have any apprehension at all is surprising if only because Mr. d’Angerville has enjoyed considerable worldly success in his own right, away from Burgundy and his father. “When I was young, my father said that there wasn’t room for me at the domaine,” Mr. d’Angerville said. “He encouraged me — pushed me, really — to get out. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. My father did me a great favor.”

He became an investment banker, spending 25 years with JP Morgan, including a two-year stint in New York and 10 years in London, and eventually ended up in the company’s Paris office before inheriting his family’s wine estate.

So why would someone of such sophistication and success feel any apprehension? Mr. d’Angerville’s father, Jacques, was one of Burgundy’s most high-minded growers. When he died at age 76, he left behind a legacy of 52 vintages of some of the finest wines produced in Burgundy, red wines of exceptional purity and longevity created from low-yielding vines of clones or strains of pinot noir he carefully selected over the decades. He was also president of the Interprofessional Committee for the Wines of the Côte d’Or and of the Yonne for six years, as well as the president of the Institute of Vines and Wine. Both are serious organizations of significant importance to Burgundy growers.

I knew the elder d’Angerville, having visited the estate multiple times over the years. He was a formal, reticent man who, quite frankly, terrified me, even though he was always welcoming and courteous. When I mentioned this, the younger Mr. d’Angerville laughed and commented, “I understand. My father was a very reserved man. He was not easy.”

Mr. d’Angerville’s challenge of hewing to his father’s high standard and then, somehow, making his own mark, appears to have been met effortlessly. A tasting of the 2006 vintage in the strikingly small cellar of the estate — it’s a little bigger than a three-car garage — shows that, whatever reservations Mr. d’Angerville might have about filling his father’s shoes, they are not evident in the wines now under his control.

The 2006 wines are, in a word, lovely. “I have no desire to change anything about how my father made wines or the style he preferred,” Mr. d’Angerville said. After tasting the 2006 Volnay Clos des Ducs — it can stop you in your tasting tracks with its intense minerals-mixed-with-wildfruits quality — a 1990 Clos des Ducs was subsequently brought out.

“I need an excuse to taste this wine,” explained Mr. d’Angerville. “Because I only had 16 bottles left in the domaine’s cellar. And now it’s down to 15,” he added wistfully. How was it? Stunning, of course, still youthful and bright-hued after 17 years.

Because New York has been one of the estate’s best and most loyal markets, starting in the late 1940s, Domaine Marquis d’Angerville wines are more available here than in either Burgundy or Paris, or probably anywhere else in the world. Prices range from $40 to $190 a bottle, depending upon the vineyard and the vintage.