Bourgogne

Burgundy fascinates. Wine lovers come here on pilgrimage, perhaps in search of a lost sacredness? They travel through the well-named Côte d'Or, dotted with villages with enchanting names and half-closed shutters. After the difficult post-war years, Burgundy has regained its place among the great wines of France. After the difficult post-war years, Burgundy has regained its place in the concert of great French wines. The monks have long since stopped cultivating the vines and the abbeys contemplate their former glory, but who cares? Here, time has almost stopped... At least, it flows more slowly, to the rhythm of the small rivers and streams that you encounter as soon as you get off the beaten track. Travelling in Burgundy means entering a different time frame. One could almost find the sensations of Dumay travelling through this country of vineyards and bocages during the post-war period: "A line of ridges sometimes broken by a combe, below a fine curtain of vines barely leaning, villages squeezed into their clumps of trees, a discreet harmony over which the gaze of the careless glides, such is the royal road of the wines to me on this light morning in July. Rather beautiful, like all things when you look at them well. In Switzerland and in the Rhone valley, I have seen more picturesque vines, goat vines that climb up the rocks". With its "lieux-dits", its "clos" and its "combes", its faults and its low walls, its "terroirs" and its 1,247 "climats" listed as Unesco heritage sites, Burgundy can be read by the glass as a sensory world of rare complexity, where each great wine appears to be the ideal reflection of the place where it was born... Linking flavour to origin is perhaps the vocation of all true culture, for it begins with taste. Like Claude Levi-Strauss, who met the Nambikwara Indians of the Mato Grosso in 1938 and who, tasting their various honeys, observed that their "deep perfumes can be analysed in several stages, in the manner of Burgundy wines... Legend has it that, in Burgundy, the monks went so far as to taste the soil before planting vines. Aristotelians by training, they believed in a science of classification of the land and we owe them most of the subtle and precise division of the Burgundian climates. In fact, they were probably more interested in the structure of the clay than in the taste of the terroir. However, the terroir revealed is far from being a fable: with the same viticulture, the difference exists (for those who know how to perceive it) between a Richebourg and a Romanée Saint-Vivant. Even if only a few metres separate the bottom of the Richebourg from the Saint-Vivant! From a geological point of view, the data seem simple: the clay-limestone soil gives a certain homogeneity to the Burgundy vineyard. To translate this substratum, two grape varieties are used: Chardonnay for the whites and Pinot Noir for the reds. The history of the Burgundy vineyards began more than 150 million years ago, in the secondary era, during the Jurassic period. It is indeed during this long period that the alterations of marine sedimentary rocks were gradually deposited. These sediments constitute today the subsoil from which the Burgundian vines draw their substance. The erection of the Alps, some sixty million years ago, completed the work, determining the topography of the vineyard. However, the Côte does not have a totally homogeneous relief: it is crossed by two transverse cuts, the Volnay syncline and the Gevrey anticline (which favours the Bajocian limestone with entroques). It is on the basis of these two cuts, which, within the Jurassic, reveal more or less recent formations, that we can understand the difference between the Côte de Beaune type and the Côte de Nuits type. In the same way, it is the geological substratum and its composition that allow us to better understand why within the Côte de Beaune, certain climates are predisposed to produce the greatest whites (Meursault, Puligny and part of Chassagne). In this area, the Middle Jurassic period reappears with the presence of white marl favourable to white wine. A romantic vision" exclaim the anti-terroirists who find here an excellent pretext to undermine the idea of terroir and underline on the contrary the essential role of man in the birth of a great wine. So winemaking or idealized terroir? The debate is biased. We know perfectly well that there is no predestination of great wine and that it is the fruit of a "stubbornness of civilisation. This means that wine is at the crossroads of history in the broad sense (anthropological, geological, climatic, economic, technical) and culture. To summarise the problem, we can say that the notion of terroir is a complex integrating geology, topography, climate and the work of man. Not all "terroirs" are equal and, without these fundamental data, the most brilliant winemaker, unless he has a magic wand, will not be able to transform lead into gold. If there is no predestination for great wine, there are terroirs that are more likely to produce great wines. It should be noted that the Burgundy vineyard is not limited to its central part, that long strip of land less than 50 km long which runs from Santenay to Dijon, but covers an area of nearly 30,000 ha from Auxerre to Mâcon. Its two extremities, a little less known, are nevertheless the source of white wines which sometimes have nothing to envy to those of the Côte de Beaune: Chablis and the great Auxerrois in the northern part with their vineyards of hillsides bordering the valley of Serein make the beautiful part of the chardonnay which draws a particular energy from the soils of the kimméridgien, stage of the upper Jurassic. To the south, on the border with the Beaujolais, the Mâconnais is also distinguished by its chalky terroir (brown chalky soils and brown chalky soils from the Middle and Upper Jurassic). In its finest climates to the west and south of Mâcon, the Mâconnais is the source of great, bright whites that can also compete with their northern cousins. The Gamay grape (banished from Burgundy in 1395 by Philippe le Hardi) is found here and already heralds the Beaujolais.