Puligny, Chassagne and Montrachet

Walk south out of Puligny and within a few hundred metres you cross five grand cru appellations. In order up and down the slope: Chevalier-Montrachet at the top, Montrachet itself in the middle, Bâtard-Montrachet below, with Bienvenues-Bâtard and Criots-Bâtard on either flank. Montrachet is about eight hectares. The whole complex would fit inside a decent English farm.

The stacking is the lesson. Chevalier sits highest, on the thinnest soil over rock, and gives the most vertical and tense of the family: a wine that can seem almost severe young and then goes on for thirty years. Bâtard sits lowest, on deeper and heavier ground, and gives breadth, weight and a richer, broader palate that arrives sooner. Montrachet, in between, is the one that manages both, which is why it costs what it costs.

Upper, middle, lower. Three appellations, three characters, and the characters hold across producers and across vintages. If the soil-depth argument made in the geology chapter needed a single demonstration, this hillside is it.

The boundary between the communes of Puligny and Chassagne runs straight through Montrachet, which is why in 1879 both villages hyphenated the name onto their own. Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet are therefore both partly named after a vineyard that belongs to neither of them exclusively: a small piece of shared theft that the appellation system subsequently made permanent.

The two villages themselves differ in ways worth knowing. Puligny is the taut, floral, precise one; Chassagne is broader and heavier, with more clay and a warmer exposure in places. Part of Puligny's precision has an unexpectedly practical cause: the water table beneath the village sits so high that cellars there flood, so a good deal of Puligny is actually raised in cellars in Meursault. An inconvenience of hydrology has stylistic consequences, because a wine matured in a cool damp cellar behaves differently from one matured in a dry warm one.

Chassagne carries a fact that surprises people. Until the middle of the twentieth century it made more red wine than white, and it still makes a substantial amount. The reds are firm, earthy and thoroughly unfashionable, which makes them one of the last genuinely cheap routes into premier cru Côte de Beaune. Several growers bottle the same premier cru in both colours, which is another of those quiet experiments the region offers and almost nobody runs.

And then there is Saint-Aubin, in the hills behind. Its best premiers crus (En Remilly, Les Murgers des Dents de Chien) run right up against Chevalier-Montrachet on the other side of the ridge. Same rock, same slope, a little higher and cooler, and for most of the twentieth century that extra coolness was a defect: the fruit struggled to ripen in an average year. Warming has turned the defect into an advantage, and Saint-Aubin has become the standard answer to the question of what to drink now that Puligny has become unaffordable.

Enough people know the answer that it is no longer as cheap as it was, which is the fate of every good tip in Burgundy. The useful version of the advice is more general: whenever a famous slope becomes unaffordable, look directly behind it, uphill, where the same geology continues at an altitude that used to be too cold.