Burgundy and Beaujolais

Where Bordeaux blends grapes across large estates, Burgundy does the opposite: one grape per wine, and vineyards divided into plots sometimes smaller than a suburban section. Pinot Noir for the reds, Chardonnay for the whites, and essentially nothing else across the heart of the region.

The premise is that if you hold the grape constant, the differences you taste must come from the ground. Burgundy has spent roughly 1,000 years - much of it monastic - mapping which patches of a single hillside produce better wine, and the resulting map is the most detailed expression of terroir anywhere.

Chablis sits far to the north on limestone full of fossilised oysters, and makes steely, high acid Chardonnay with little or no oak. The Côte d’Or is the famous strip, and the ground every other Pinot Noir on earth gets compared to, Central Otago included. Beaujolais, at the southern end, is really its own region: granite instead of limestone, and Gamay. Chablis aside, I haven’t explored Burgundy properly yet, so treat that as a map rather than a recommendation.

Burgundy is expensive because of scarcity and a legal accident. Napoleonic inheritance law required estates to be split equally between heirs at every generation, and two centuries of that has fragmented the vineyards into thousands of tiny holdings - the 50 hectare grand cru Clos de Vougeot has around 80 different owners, some working rows you could measure in metres. So the vineyard name on the label tells you less than you would like: 80 growers on one site make 80 different wines of wildly varying quality. In Burgundy the producer matters more than the appellation, which is the exact inverse of the rule that works everywhere else in France.

In 1395 Philip the Bold banned Gamay from Burgundy proper, calling it "a very bad and disloyal plant". It went south to the granite of Beaujolais and turned out to be ideally suited.

The region’s reputation was then wrecked by its own marketing success. Beaujolais Nouveau, released weeks after harvest and made by carbonic maceration, became a global novelty in the 1980s and taught a generation that Beaujolais meant thin wine tasting of banana and bubblegum. Meanwhile the named cru villages were making serious Gamay that ages a decade at a fraction of Burgundy prices. Not explored yet.