Villages with double-barreled names are the key to Burgundy’s greatest wines. This is because these villages hijacked the names of their most famous vineyards, so that humble village wines could sell on the backs of the finest grands crus. The village of Gevrey was the first to do this when in 1848 it took the name of its Chambertin vineyard to become Gevrey-Chambertin. You cannot become a Burgundy expert overnight, but if you remember the second part of every double-barreled Burgundian village is one of its best vineyards, you will instantly know some of Burgundy’s greatest wines.
SAY “BURGUNDY” AND most people think of the famous wines of the Côtes de Nuits and Côtes de Beaune, but Burgundy in fact stretches from Chablis in the north, which is close to the Aube vineyards of Champagne, down to Beaujolais in the south, in the Rhône département. In fact, the Côtes de Nuits and Côtes de Beaune account for less than 10 percent of Burgundy, while Beaujolais represents almost half of the region’s entire production. Burgundy still produces the world’s greatest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines, and the only Gamay wines ever to achieve classic status, but it is increasingly debased by a growing number of lackluster, sometimes quite disgusting, supermarket wines that rely solely upon the reputation of the famous Burgundian names, which their producers abuse to sell low-quality wines at high prices.
Burgundy, or Bourgogne as it is known in French, is an area rich in history, gastronomy, and wine, but unlike the great estates of Bordeaux, the finest Burgundian vineyards are owned by a proliferation of smallholders. Prior to 1789, the church owned most of the vineyards in Burgundy, but these were seized and broken up as a direct result of the Revolution, which was as much antichurch as antiaristocracy. While in Bordeaux, although some of the large wine estates were owned by the aristocracy, many were owned by the bourgeoisie, who, because of their long
association with the English, were antipapist, and so escaped the full wrath of the Revolution. In Burgundy the great vineyards were further fragmented by inheritance laws, which divided the plots into smaller and smaller parcels. Consequently, many crus, or growths, are now owned by as many as 85 individual growers. The initial effect of this proprietorial carve-up was to encourage the supremacy of le négoce. Few commercial houses had been established prior to the mid-18th century because of the difficulty of exporting from a land-locked area, but with better transportation and no opposition from land-owning aristocracy, merchant power grew rapidly. A network of brokers evolved in which dealers became experts on very small, localized areas. As ownership diversified even further, it became a very specialized, and therefore rewarding, job to keep an up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of a complex situation. The brokers were vital to the success of a négociant, and the négoce himself was essential to the success of international trade and therefore responsible for establishing the reputation of Burgundy.
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