Evil and Disloyal

On the thirty-first of July 1395, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, issued an ordinance about a grape.

The language is worth quoting because nothing else in the administrative history of wine sounds like it. Gamay was evil and disloyal. Its wine made people ill. It was to be ripped out, eradicated, destroyed, reduced to nought, forever. Vines were to be cut down within a month and fully removed by the following Easter.

Dijon did not comply. The city had a great deal of Gamay planted and no intention of pulling it up, and the dispute rumbled on into the next century before a compromise was reached.

So the edict failed at what it said it was doing. What it succeeded at was something else entirely.

Gamay moved south. Out of the Côte, down past the Chalonnaise and the Mâconnais, onto the granite of Beaujolais, where it turned out to be considerably better suited than it had ever been on the Côte's limestone. The duke did not eliminate a grape. He relocated one, and the place he relocated it to was the place it should have been all along.

Now, the part usually left out of the romantic telling.

The ordinance is presented as a quality decision, and there is a real quality argument inside it. Gamay on the Côte's limestone genuinely does make thinner, coarser wine than pinot noir does, and the duke was not inventing that.

He was also protecting a price.

Gamay yields heavily and ripens reliably. A grower who planted it made substantially more wine with substantially less risk, and could sell it cheaply. If you are the duke, and your reputation and your revenue both rest on the scarce expensive wine your own vignerons produce, a cheap and abundant competitor growing in the same villages is a commercial problem before it is an aesthetic one.

Both things are true at once, and the ordinance did not need to choose between them. Most regulation in wine has this shape and is described, later and by the beneficiaries, as having been purely about quality.

But the consequence is the thing that matters to this subject, and it is enormous.

After 1395, one red grape is effectively compulsory on the Côte d'Or.

Think about what that does. If two neighbouring vineyards make wine that tastes different, and both are planted to pinot noir, farmed in the same climate, in the same year, the explanation cannot be the variety. It has to be somewhere else. Remove variety as a variable and the ground becomes visible.

Six centuries of monoculture are the precondition for everything in this subject: the climats, the classification, the arguments about mid-slope drainage, the entire apparatus of a region that believes it can taste a change of rock across twenty metres.

You cannot have that conversation in a region growing eight grapes. The differences get absorbed into variety and nobody can tell what is doing what.

So Burgundy's obsession with place is downstream of a duke removing the alternative, for reasons that were partly about quality and partly about money, in an ordinance that was not even obeyed.

And the grape he expelled went south and founded a region of its own, which is the subject of the next three chapters.