Neighbourly Tolerance
In April 1994, the Glengarry Wineletter ran a cartoon. Two growers, squared off over a single square metre of Burgundy dirt, one of them insisting he'd bought it fair and square the year before. Next to it sat our write-up on the Côte d'Or, which made the same point: a single vineyard here can be split between more than seventy growers, "which must stretch neighbourly tolerance to the limits."
We dug it out of the archive last week. Thirty years on and not a word has dated.
Here is the thing people don't quite believe until they've stood on it. The Côte d'Or is a ribbon of hillside barely fifty kilometres long, running south from Dijon, and it carries some of the most valuable farmland on earth. It isn't the prettiest, nor is it the largest. Yet it's the most valuable, metre for metre. Over the centuries it has been carved into 1,247 individually named parcels, climats, each with its own name, its own boundary, its own place in the pecking order, until the map looks less like a wine region and more like a very old and very stubborn argument about who owns what.
The blame, if you can call it that, belongs to two rather different factors. First came the monks, who spent the better part of a thousand years walking the slopes, tasting the soil (literally, by some accounts), and deciding that this strip of limestone produced a different wine from that one three metres downhill, then building a wall to prove it.
Then there's the law of inheritance, which for two hundred years has demanded that a man's land be split equally among his children. Blame Napoleon for that one. Over the years you can imagine how it goes: small parcels divided into even smaller still, until the map resembles a mosaic.
Do that enough times and you arrive at Clos de Vougeot: fifty hectares behind a single medieval wall, one of the most famous names in wine, now shared between more than eighty owners. The average holding works out to something you could park a car on, give or take. Eighty people making eighty different wines from the same walled field, all of them legally entitled to the same grand name on the label, none of them speaking to the neighbour whose vines start where theirs stop. The 1994 standoff was barely an exaggeration. They're territorial over there.
Now, you could read all of that as madness. We'd argue it's quite the opposite. Burgundy is the one place in the wine world that decided, centuries before anyone had a marketing department, that the place mattered more than the person selling it.
Everyone else in wine has spent the last few decades trying to get bigger, smoother, more consistent -- that dreaded word, consistency. Burgundy went the other way and refused to round off its edges, which is why that nervy, cussed, impossible-to-summarise little strip of France remains the thing every serious drinker eventually falls down the hole of, sooner or later.
The catch, of course, is the money. The famous names have drifted somewhere close to lunacy, and most of us will never drink them. The good news, the reason we're writing this at all, is that you can still taste exactly what makes Burgundy, Burgundy without going anywhere near the auction houses or uttering the words "DRC".
Which brings us to the shelf. Our French sale runs until 19 July, and there's more than enough Burgundy in it to make the point. Louis Latour's Bourgogne Chardonnay is proof that white Burgundy bears almost no relation to the word New Zealanders picture when they hear "Chardonnay". It's leaner, tighter, built around the fruit rather than buried under it.
Push a little further north to Domaine Chevallier's Petit Chablis, grown over soil packed with hundred-million-year-old oyster shells, and you get Chardonnay stripped back to stone and salt, the greatest seafood wine going, and a fine argument against turning the heater up too high.
For the table, Domaine Parent's Bourgogne Côte d'Or is a Pommard house making honest, savoury Pinot at a fraction of what the postcode above it commands. And if you want to drink a genuine Vosne-Romanée name without the Vosne-Romanée invoice, Anne Gros's crémant, La Fun en Bulles (yes, that's what it's called) is a serious grower having a good time.
We've been selling French wine, and writing about it like this, for a very long time. The cartoon hasn't aged a day; nor has the quality of good Burgundy.
