The Côte Chalonnaise

South of the Côte de Beaune the escarpment breaks up. Instead of one continuous slope you get a scatter of hills at varying angles, cut by valleys, with vineyards on whichever flanks happen to face the right way. This is the Côte Chalonnaise, and its geography explains most of its history: it was overlooked because it is not one thing you can point at.

There are five appellations that matter, running north to south: Bouzeron, Rully, Mercurey, Givry and Montagny. The grapes are the same as the Côte d'Or's. The soils are limestone. The hierarchy is identical (régionale, village, premier cru) with one step missing at the top. There are no grands crus.

That absence does most of the pricing. A famous grand cru raises the price of everything below it, and where no grand cru exists there is nothing pulling the ceiling up. Chalonnaise wines cost roughly a third of Côte d'Or equivalents and are generally lighter and shorter-lived, which is a fair trade at the price and an extremely good one on a restaurant list, where mark-ups compound the gap.

The five have distinct jobs. Mercurey is the largest and overwhelmingly red, with a long list of premiers crus and a style firm enough to be mistaken for the Côte de Beaune in a good year. Givry is red too, softer and earlier. Rully makes both colours and is the historic home of Burgundy's Crémant, which is worth remembering the next time someone assumes sparkling Burgundy is a novelty. Montagny, at the southern end, is white only.

And Bouzeron is the odd one, because it is given over to aligoté.

Aligoté is Burgundy's other white grape, and for most of the twentieth century it was a joke: high-acid, thin, planted on ground chardonnay did not want, and best known as the base of a kir, which is to say as something you improve with cassis. Bouzeron is the only village appellation in Burgundy dedicated to it, and the case being made there (with old vines, low yields and proper cellar work) is that the joke was about the farming rather than about the grape. Good aligoté is sharp, saline, faintly bitter in a way that makes you want food, and ages further than anyone expects. It has become fashionable, which in Burgundy means it has become less cheap.

The broader point the Chalonnaise makes is about what a reputation actually is. These are the same varieties on the same kind of rock at almost the same latitude, farmed by people with access to the same knowledge, under the same appellation law. What they lack is a thousand years of monks writing down which parcel was better, a nineteenth-century map ranking them, and a century of collectors bidding. Some of the gap in the glass is real. The sites genuinely are less well placed, on average, and the wines genuinely are shorter. But some of the gap is simply that nobody has spent eight hundred years arguing about Givry.

For anyone learning the region this is the practical entry point. You can buy a Mercurey premier cru and a Givry premier cru and a Rully blanc for the price of one village Volnay, and taste the structure of Burgundy (the tiers, the climat names, the producer differences) without the fee. Whether you eventually conclude the Côte d'Or is worth its premium is a question you are better placed to answer from down here.