Since then, Mr. Ponsot has stayed “silent and hidden,” as he put it in a recent interview in New York, when for the first time since his departure he spoke about his plans. In typical Ponsot fashion, he is going his own way.

First, Mr. Ponsot said, he will be making wine, both from grapes he purchases as a négociant and from vineyards that he owns. And he will be working with his son, Clément.

“I was born above a cellar in Morey-St.-Denis and grew up among barrels and vats, working with my father,” he said. “I think I have some blood in my wine, not wine in my blood.”

Mr. Ponsot, 63, lean and voluble with salt-and-pepper hair that once hung past his shoulders but is now trimmed neatly, said his new label would simply be “Laurent Ponsot,” which he said represented not an estate or a house, but simply an “entity.” The name was selected not out of vanity, he said, but as an assumption of responsibility for what is in the bottle.

Domaine Ponsot was best known for its grand cru Burgundies, in particular its Clos de la Roche, a vineyard named for the rockiness of its limestone soils — a character expressed, as the French wine writer Jacky Rigaux once put it, “to the chagrin of pickaxes and ploughs but to the delight of the roots that can penetrate into the depths of the parent rock.”