Pommard and Volnay

Pommard and Volnay share a boundary. Neither has a grand cru. Both make almost exclusively red wine from pinot noir, farmed by overlapping sets of growers under identical rules, in the same weather, on the same continuous stretch of slope. And they have been described as opposites for two hundred years.

Pommard is the firm one: darker, denser, more tannic, slower to open, with a structure people reach for words like 'four-square' to describe. Volnay is the perfumed one: paler, higher-toned, silkier, approachable years earlier. The contrast is so consistent that it is the first thing anybody is told about either village.

The explanation is in the ground, and it is the same explanation as Gevrey and Chambolle twenty kilometres north. Pommard's soils carry more clay and more iron. The best premier cru is called Les Rugiens, from rouge, for the colour of the earth. More clay means more water, more vigour, thicker skins, more tannin. Volnay's soils are thinner and paler, with a higher limestone fraction and less water-holding, and give aroma and fine tannin instead of mass. The same gradient produces the same result at both ends of the Côte, which is the closest thing the region has to a repeatable experiment.

What makes the pair genuinely useful rather than merely picturesque is that you can run the experiment yourself, cheaply, in an evening. Several growers farm in both communes. Buy a Pommard and a Volnay from the same producer and the same vintage, and every variable except the ground has been held constant: same picking philosophy, same cellar, same barrels, same hands. Whatever separates the two glasses is hillside. There is no other region where that experiment is so easy to set up, and doing it once is worth more than reading twenty articles about terroir.

Two local details are worth carrying. Pommard spent much of the twentieth century as Burgundy's most abused appellation, precisely because the name sold itself: it is easy to say, foreigners recognised it, and a great deal of indifferent wine left the region under it. Its two serious climats, Les Rugiens and Les Épenots, are a different proposition entirely, and Rugiens-Bas has had a grand cru case argued for it for decades. If your only experience of Pommard is a cheap one, you have not met the village.

And Volnay contains the Côte de Beaune's favourite anomaly. Les Santenots, one of Volnay's best-known premiers crus, is not in Volnay. It is in Meursault. Red wine grown on that ground is sold as Volnay-Santenots; white wine from the same rows is sold as Meursault. This looks absurd until you see what it admits: appellation boundaries encode a judgement about which name best describes a wine, and that judgement is allowed to depend on the wine's colour. The map is not a map of soil. It is a map of what people concluded about soil, which is a different and more human thing.

Volnay is also, for what it is worth, the best first serious red Burgundy most people can buy. It gives the aromatic, silky side of pinot noir without demanding ten years of patience, and because the Côte de Beaune's reds live in the shadow of its whites, the prices have not run away as Chambolle's have. It is legible: you can taste what people mean by perfume and fine tannin without a large bill, which is the whole difficulty with learning this region.