Corton and Corton-Charlemagne

The Côte d'Or is a scarp: one long broken edge, facing roughly east, with the classified vineyards strung along its middle like a contour line. Corton is not that. Corton is a hill: a dome standing slightly forward of the escarpment, wooded at the top, with vineyards wrapping around it from the south-west through south to east.

That geometry has one enormous consequence. Everywhere else, a grand cru has one aspect and therefore one broad character. Corton's classified ground spans several aspects across three communes (Aloxe-Corton, Ladoix-Serrigny and Pernand-Vergelesses) and consequently supports two entirely different appellations on one hillside: Corton, which is the Côte de Beaune's only red grand cru, and Corton-Charlemagne, which is one of the world's great white wines.

The division is broadly by height and direction. The white occupies the upper slopes and the western and south-western flank, where the soil is paler, more marl-rich and cooler, and chardonnay ripens slowly enough to keep its acidity. The red occupies the lower and eastern ground, redder and more ferruginous, where pinot noir gets the warmth it needs. The boundary is not absolute (parts of the hill permit either colour, and the split is as much economics and convention as law) but it holds well enough to explain the hill to a visitor in one sentence.

The Charlemagne story is the piece of Burgundian folklore everyone at a table will have heard: the emperor, whose beard was being stained by red wine, ordered white vines planted. It is almost certainly invention. The documented part is a land grant on the hill to the abbey of Saulieu in 775, during his reign, and the name stuck. The wine deserves better than its anecdote.

What it does not deserve is being opened young. Corton-Charlemagne is the slowest of the great white Burgundies. At three years it is frequently tight to the point of seeming austere, and people who have paid a great deal of money conclude the wine is overrated. Somewhere between eight and twenty years it turns broad, saline and enormous. More expensive bottles are wasted through impatience here than anywhere else in the region.

Corton the red has a different problem: inconsistency. At around 160 hectares of classified ground, it is by a wide margin the largest grand cru in Burgundy: bigger than all of Vosne's put together. Size, plus several aspects, plus several soil types, plus dozens of owners of widely differing ability, produces exactly what it produced at Clos de Vougeot: superb bottles and dull ones sharing an appellation. A generic 'Corton' on a list tells you remarkably little.

Which is why Corton does something most grands crus do not: it permits its constituent lieux-dits to be named on the label. Le Corton, Les Bressandes, Clos du Roi, Les Renardes, Les Perrières are known quantities with distinct reputations, and a label reading 'Corton Clos du Roi Grand Cru' is carrying three place names and is entirely regular. Given the hill's variability the practice is a kindness, and for a buyer it is the difference between a gamble and a decision.

The general lesson of Corton is the one the classification chapter keeps returning to from different angles. An appellation is a boundary. Boundaries can enclose ground that is uniform or ground that is not, and the word 'grand cru' says nothing about which kind you are holding.