The place#
Burgundy, in eastern France, is a narrow idea stretched over 200 kilometres, and I still learn something every time I drive it. Chablis sits alone in the north-west, 130 kilometres from Beaune and nearer Auxerre than Dijon. South of Dijon the Côte d’Or runs for about 50 kilometres as one east-facing escarpment: the Côte de Nuits, from Gevrey-Chambertin past Vosne-Romanée to Nuits-Saint-Georges, then the Côte de Beaune, from Beaune through Pommard and Volnay to Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet.
Beaune is the wine capital and my base. The Hôtel-Dieu, founded in 1443 as a hospital for the poor, still owns vineyards; its wines have been auctioned on the third Sunday of November since 1859. Under the town the négociant houses keep cellars that run on for streets; above it the vines start at the last garden wall.
Nowhere else lets you taste one grape from two plots fifty metres apart and find two wines. The rest of France argues about grapes; Burgundy argues about places.
Terroir: limestone, marl and the mid-slope#
The Côte d’Or vineyards lie between roughly 220 and 400 metres, facing east and south-east. The premiers and grands crus sit mid-slope at 250 to 300 metres: enough slope to drain, enough soil to feed a vine, above the frost on the flat and below the thin ground near the trees.
The bedrock is Jurassic limestone and marl, but it changes every few hundred metres. Pommard has iron-rich clay, and its reds are firm. Meursault and Puligny, three kilometres apart, have white marl and limestone scree; the Chardonnay is broader in Meursault, more linear in Puligny. Chablis is a different geology altogether: Kimmeridgian marl full of fossil oyster shells, and the wine tastes of it.
The climate is continental: spring frost is the recurring fear, hail the local catastrophe, and recent summers have moved the harvest from early October into mid-September. Vintage matters here more than anywhere else on my routes.
Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and the climats#
Two grapes do almost all the work: Pinot Noir for red, Chardonnay for white. Aligoté makes a sharp white for a kir or escargots; Crémant de Bourgogne opens the evening. Gamay was banned from the Duchy in 1395 by Philip the Bold and lives in Beaujolais now.
A climat is a named plot of vines with fixed boundaries and its own wine identity; a lieu-dit is only a cadastral name. The Cistercians of Cîteaux, who walled the Clos de Vougeot in the twelfth century, recorded some of the first. There are 1,247 of them, listed by UNESCO on 4 July 2015. The appellation system stacks them: 84 AOCs on about 30,000 hectares, 7 regional, 44 village and 33 grand cru. Les Pucelles in Puligny, Clos Saint-Jacques in Gevrey and Les Perrières in Meursault are premiers crus: the names on the labels are on the stone markers at the end of the rows.
In the cellar the questions are older than the natural wine debate: whole clusters or destemmed, new oak at 15 percent or at 100, moderate sulfur at most classic domaines. This is the classic counterpoint on my French routes, the reason I pair it with Champagne rather than the Jura: precision, patience and a fixed address, without a manifesto. The trade-offs are in what I pour.
Négociants and domaines#
A négociant buys grapes or finished wine and sells it under his own name. The great houses were built this way: Bouchard Père et Fils in 1731, Louis Latour in 1797, Faiveley in 1825, Louis Jadot in 1859, Joseph Drouhin in 1880. Most also own large estates today.
A domaine grows its own grapes and bottles them. Domaine bottling spread in the 1930s and again in the 1970s and 80s, when export markets learned the names and the grower with 6 hectares in 20 parcels became the ideal.
Since the 2000s the line has blurred. Philippe Pacalet in Beaune, a nephew of Marcel Lapierre, buys grapes and makes whole-cluster, low-sulfur wines; Dujac and Leflaive each run a négoce line beside the domaine. On tour I put a house wine and a domaine wine from the same village side by side and let the table decide.
Producers to know#
Domaine Leflaive, Puligny-Montrachet. Vines in the village since 1717; Anne-Claude Leflaive converted the estate to biodynamics in 1997 and made it the standing argument for the method in white Burgundy. Chevalier-Montrachet is the largest grand cru holding. No public tasting room; Olivier Leflaive’s separate house in the village does receive visitors.
Domaine Dujac, Morey-Saint-Denis. Founded in 1968 by Jacques Seysses; his sons Jeremy and Alec and Jeremy’s wife Diana Snowden Seysses run it now. Clos de la Roche and Clos Saint-Denis are the heart of it: whole-cluster, perfumed, farmed organically. Not open to the public.
Maison Joseph Drouhin, Beaune. Founded in 1880; cellars under the town from the thirteenth century; around 90 hectares of estate vines farmed organically, from Chablis to the Mâconnais. Beaune Clos des Mouches, red and white, is the signature. Daily cellar tours booked through the house: where a group sees what a négociant is.
Domaine Fanny Sabre, Pommard. Fanny Sabre took over her family’s small domaine in 2005, mentored for three years by Philippe Pacalet. Organic, whole or partial clusters, old barrels, little or no sulfur, unfiltered. Pommard, Volnay, Beaune and Savigny at village level: natural Burgundy without theatre, and my natural counterpoint on this route.
The names you will hear everywhere: Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Vosne, biodynamic and closed to visitors; Armand Rousseau in Gevrey; Raveneau and Vincent Dauvissat in Chablis, allocation only; Prieuré-Roch in Nuits-Saint-Georges, some cuvées without added sulfur. The top domaines see the trade only; I say so before we go, and we drink their wines at dinner.
What a day here looks like on tour#
We sleep in Beaune. At 09:30 the minibus takes the Route des Grands Crus north to Gevrey-Chambertin, 35 kilometres of village signs the group knows from wine lists. We stop at the Clos de Vougeot wall and walk up through the crus, so that everyone has stood mid-slope before anyone tastes.
The first cellar is at 10:30: five or six Pinot Noirs, village before premier cru, two vintages of the same climat if the domaine will open them. Lunch is in a village restaurant: oeufs en meurette, jambon persillé, boeuf bourguignon if it is cold, Aligoté to start and a village red after. Époisses at the end, with an aged white rather than a young red, because the cheese wins otherwise.
The afternoon belongs to Chardonnay. Meursault and Puligny are eight and twelve kilometres south of Beaune, and I taste the two villages within an hour so the difference is still in the mouth. Dinner in Beaune finishes with the wines we could not visit.
Practical#
Beaune is about 315 kilometres from Paris, 3 h 15 by road, or 1 h 35 by TGV to Dijon and 20 minutes more by train; from Lyon’s airport about 150 kilometres, 1 h 45. Beaune to Puligny is 12 kilometres, to Gevrey 35; Chablis is a day of its own, 130 kilometres and 1 h 30 each way.
Best months are May to June, when the domaines have time, and October, when the leaves turn. Mid-September is harvest, and many small domaines close while they pick; the négociant houses stay open. The Hospices auction weekend in November fills every hotel in Beaune. Paid tastings are normal and appointments are needed everywhere; my notes on visiting a winemaker apply doubly.
Burgundy is the first half of my Burgundy and Champagne classics tour, based in Beaune before we go north to Champagne. To build a week around one village, one grape or the auction, ask me about a private tour.
