Delving into Burgundy’s two Côtes
Looking up towards the Premiers and Grands Crus in Vosne-Romanée
Burgundy doesn’t look all that. At a glance, the fabled golden slope – the Côte d’Or – looks rather unremarkable. Zipping along the autoroute, in amongst lorries charging down to Lyon, it’s easy to be unimpressed by its gentle incline. But, take a turn off the motorway and start winding your way along the Route des Grands Crus, the single-lane road that snakes through the belly of the region and its sleepy villages, and you start to get a sense of its magic.
Narrow tracks and crumbling dry-stone walls divide tiny parcels of land, with cabottes (small cabins that traditionally provided refuge for vineyard workers) dotting the scenery. Valleys known as combes cut into the slope, adding texture to this narrow band of prime terroir. What from a distance seemed monotonal reveals itself as a complex weave of row upon row of vines. Signs bear names that send a shiver down the spine of any wine-lover – Montrachet, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, Bonnes-Mares, Chambertin and more.
Burgundy’s soils date back to the Jurassic era, over 150 million years ago, when the area was a sea – bringing the marine deposits that are now found in its deep limestone bedrock. Shifts in tectonic plates formed its hillsides around 30 million years ago, creating the swirling combination and complex layering of (mainly) clay and limestone that define the terroir today. Vines have graced this area since the second century and the differences between its sites, as well as the grapes and wine produced, have been recognised since the 14thcentury. But there are two clear halves to this heralded region: the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune – each deeply distinctive.
The northern half of the region is the Côte de Nuits, running from Corgoloin to Chenôve, close to Dijon. Taking its name from the town of Nuits-Saint-Georges, this is the home of the heartbreak grape, Pinot Noir – with more marl (a fine-grained mixture of clay and limestone) in the soils, which is better suited to growing this most pernickety of grapes. Indeed you’ll find little Chardonnay here at all. Vosne, Gevrey and Chambolle don’t permit the variety, while there are only 10 hectares in Nuits-Saint-Georges, six in Morey-Saint-Denis and five in Fixin. The exceptions are Vougeot – where almost a third of the vineyards are dedicated to Chardonnay – and Marsannay, which has over 40 hectares of white vines – but all in all just 5% of the wine made here is white.
This 20-kilometre strip offers a roll-call of red-wine grandeur, home to 24 of Burgundy’s top vineyards, the Grands Crus. Land prices here are some of the highest in the world; when François Pinault (president of the Artémis group and owner of Ch. Latour) purchased Clos de Tart in 2017, he allegedly paid over €30 million per hectare. There tends to be a discreet polish to the vignerons here, a subtle self-assurance that perhaps comes from their unmatched lineage – with many families having lived and worked here for generations – as well as the unrivalled terroir.
“There’s nowhere on earth quite like it,” Irish micro-négociant Róisín Curley MW tells me. She’s been working in Burgundy since 2015 and considers the Côte de Nuits the “sacred land”, knowledge (and ownership) of which gives the locals an “intrinsic confidence”.
But, with the villages lined up one after the other along the D974, leading up to the industrial outskirts of Dijon, there’s a quiet efficiency to the Côte de Nuits, alongside its stateliness. The villages themselves seem almost abandoned, with few people on the streets and little fanfare to even the most luxe addresses. Not as large as Beaune, Nuits-Saint-Georges – the modest metropolis at the heart of the region – doesn’t attract many visitors.
“It’s just a bit… grimey,” says Mark Haisma – an Australian who has been making wine in Burgundy since 2009 – of the town. For him, the Côte de Nuits might be where you’ll find the world’s best Pinot Noir – but it’s also the land of “big sheds”. An ever-growing number of large, functional warehouses (one of which is, he admits, his own, in Gilly-lès-Citeaux) are home to négociants, winemakers, autoshops and other industry – practical spaces that don’t necessarily add to the aesthetics.
As for the wines of the Côte de Nuits, there is a reason that these are the model for top Pinot Noir the world over – aristocratic expressions of this fragile, cerebral variety. The finest reds arguably come from Vosne-Romanée, a village whose best wines have a dignity and majesty that is incomparable; Chambolle-Musigny offers the most fine-boned, ethereal and prettiest Pinot Noir, while Nuits-Saint-Georges is firm and muscular. Gevrey-Chambertin tends to be powerful but more supple, with Morey-Saint-Denis sitting stylistically somewhere between Gevrey and Vosne. The best reds from Vougeot are broad and structured, with a density that needs time.
Marsannay, meanwhile, is the off-beat uncle of the Côte de Nuits. At the northern tip of Burgundy, it is the only village permitted to make rosé. In 1919, when Marsannay was known for thin, lacklustre reds, Bruno Clair’s grandfather returned from the war and made a rosé with the fruit from his young Pinot Noir vines. Soon, the bistros of Dijon were obsessed with his new creation – putting both the Clair family, and Marsannay, on the wine map. Bruno Clair still makes one of the appellation’s best rosés today. Just a tenth of the vineyard area is dedicated to rosé production, but the unique style – with the best matured in oak and built to age – is a standard-bearer for the village.
While its more prestigious neighbours sell for princely sums, Marsannay has long been a source of great value – and unsurprisingly, perhaps, is therefore an edgier outpost. Here, with vineyard prices lower and fruit more widely available, producers are able to flex their winemaking a little more. You’ll find more natural-leaning, new-wave names such as Sylvain Pataille, René Bouvier and Charles Audoin, among others – a modish set that sits outside Burgundy’s collector-centric circle.
The Côte de Beaune, meanwhile, picks up at Ladoix-Serrigny and stretches south to Santenay and Maranges. The landscape here is totally different – broadening out with gentler and more rolling hills, the villages tucked into hillsides with a web of smaller roads and tracks tying them together. While the Côte de Nuits produces just 5% of Burgundy’s wine, the Côte de Beaune is responsible for 11% – being home to both Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Although more red is made than white, it is the fine whites from Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet and Meursault that define the region’s reputation.
The hill of Corton announces the start of the Côte de Beaune – a towering mound which is home to Burgundy’s largest Grand Cru, and one of the only two (along with Musigny) to be classified both for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The reds tend to be tannic and broad, dark-berried and earthy in style; while the whites can be among the most powerful expressions of Chardonnay in the region, needing time to reveal their potential.
Just past Savigny and Chorey-lès-Beaune (two less fashionable appellations, mainly producing reds – and some brilliant-value bottles too) lies Beaune – the beating heart of not just the Côte de Beaune, but Burgundy as a whole. The walled centre is small – taking a mere 10 minutes to cross by foot – but the cobbled streets hum with activity, lined with small boutiques, servicing both tourists and locals. In the Place Carnot, bistros and cafés spill over onto the pavement, their tables filled with chatter and the convivial clinking of glasses. The Gothic masterpiece of the Hospices or Hôtel-Dieu sits at the core of the city – its almost austere exterior a playful contrast to the multicoloured tiling and ornate façade within its courtyard, which you inadvertently glimpse from various corners of the city.
On the outer edges of Beaune, lining the ring road, you’ll find the large négociants – the power players in the region (Louis Latour, Albert Bichot, Joseph Drouhin, Bouchard et al), many of whom also own vineyards. These merchant houses have been key to Burgundy’s survival – buying fruit or wine from the increasingly fragmented network of growers and having the money to invest in winemaking when those working the vines couldn’t afford to do so.
Beyond Beaune itself, the villages of the Côte de Beaune are quainter than their northern counterparts. Perhaps because they are, for the most part, off the main thoroughfare, they feel more lived in, but more manicured too. These are picture-postcard hamlets, spectacularly beautiful villages that are “dripping with money”, as Haisma says – with a dash of the well-heeled gloss that you’ll find in the Côte de Nuits.
Just to the south of the city lie the Côte de Beaune’s most famous red-wine villages. Pommard produces tannic, long-ageing wines for the cellar, while Volnay can – in the right hands – be responsible for some of the most delicate, aromatic expressions of Pinot Noir that are more akin to Chambolle than their closest neighbour.
Then we reach the Holy Trinity of Chardonnay. Meursault’s stereotype is decadent, silken and hazelnut-accented – a voluptuous wine that you want to sink into, but you’ll find a cohort of flintier styles being produced today too. Puligny-Montrachet is sleek and taut with mineral precision, while Chassagne-Montrachet is its slightly lesser sibling. An appellation that was historically more famous for red, but now produces more white, Chassagne’s Chardonnays can vary significantly but tend to be fleshier than the wines of Puligny, and not as generous as Meursault. Of course the most desired wines are those from the slopes of Montrachet itself, sandwiched between these two villages. These eight hectares of vines, angled southeast for ideal sun exposure, crop Chardonnay that has no peers – wines that are layered and complex, with a depth that is hard to describe.
While these top Chardonnay villages are hallowed territory, the rest of the Côte de Beaune is not as well known, less fashionable and lauded. It’s perhaps this, combined with the long tradition of growers selling to négociants here, that makes this southern part of Burgundy feel a little more relaxed and open than the Côte de Nuits, where the revered names (and matching prices) demand a more hard-nosed approach to business.
It’s only in the last generation or so that these two regions have become less segregated – indeed Haisma told me of a friend’s Gevrey-born father who caused a furore by marrying a woman from Pommard. Even today, the politics are such that two people refused to discuss the matter with me. While they may be less insular, there is much that divides the two côtes – from the varieties and styles of wine, to the feel of the landscape, soils and culture. As ever with Burgundy, however, there’s much more than at first meets the eye.
A shorter version of this article was published in On Burgundy (Académie du Vin Library, 2023), available now.
