The Mâconnais

Most white Burgundy sold in the world comes from the Mâconnais, and most people drinking it have no idea that is what they are drinking. It is the southern end of the region, warmer than the Côte d'Or, gentler in topography, far more productive, and planted almost entirely to chardonnay. The village of Chardonnay is here, which may or may not be where the grape got its name; the etymology is disputed and the coincidence is too good to check too hard.

The Mâconnais has spent its history being the useful part of Burgundy rather than the celebrated part. Its wines ripen reliably, cost little, and taste of chardonnay in an uncomplicated way: orchard fruit, a little breadth, no great demand for patience. For a long time the ambitious growers left.

Two things changed that. The first was Pouilly-Fuissé, which has always been the exception: four communes under the dramatic limestone rocks of Solutré and Vergisson, making white wine of real weight and length that has commanded serious prices for a century. (The perennial trap: Pouilly-Fumé is a completely different wine, sauvignon blanc from the Loire, two hundred kilometres away. The near-identical names have sold a great deal of the wrong bottle.) The second was a generation of growers, some from Côte d'Or families, who looked at what land cost in the Mâconnais versus what it cost in Puligny and did the arithmetic.

Then, in 2020, Pouilly-Fuissé was granted twenty-two premier cru climats: the first new premiers crus in Burgundy for decades. Saint-Véran followed with its own in 2024. This deserves more attention than it received, because the standing assumption about Burgundy's classification is that it is fixed: a nineteenth-century opinion given legal force and then frozen. It is not frozen. It moves when growers assemble the evidence, agree among themselves, and endure a process measured in years. What had held the Mâconnais back was partly that nobody had bothered.

The appellation structure beneath Pouilly-Fuissé is worth learning because it follows the same logic as everywhere else in Burgundy: the more specific the place on the label, the smaller the area the fruit came from. Plain Mâcon is the base and can be red, white or rosé. Mâcon-Villages is white only and comes from a defined list of better communes. A wine may then name its individual commune (Mâcon-Lugny, Mâcon-Verzé, Mâcon-Cruzille) which narrows it again. Above that sit the named appellations: Saint-Véran, Viré-Clessé, Pouilly-Loché, Pouilly-Vinzelles and Pouilly-Fuissé itself.

Saint-Véran deserves its own note. It is a separate appellation in two parts, lying north and south of Pouilly-Fuissé and effectively wrapping around it, which means it is frequently the same hillside at a different price. It is generally lighter, and in careful hands it is among the best value white wine made anywhere in France.

The practical conclusion is the same one that keeps arriving from different directions in this book. A named-commune Mâcon from a serious grower beats a lazy Meursault and costs a fifth as much, because the qualifier (who made it, how) moves the wine further than the appellation does at this end of the scale. At the very top of Burgundy the ground dominates. Everywhere else, and the Mâconnais is very much everywhere else, the person dominates.