What a Duke Banned

In 1395 Philippe le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy, issued an edict against a grape.

Gamay, he declared, was a very bad and disloyal plant, producing wine in great abundance but of unpleasant quality, and it was to be uprooted from the duchy's vineyards. The order named it as damaging to the reputation of Burgundy's wines, which at the time were the duchy's principal luxury export.

Whether this was quality control or the earliest recorded exercise in brand protection is a genuine question. Gamay is productive, ripens easily, and on the limestone of the Côte d'Or gives wine that is pleasant and unremarkable. On the granite of Beaujolais, thirty miles south, it produces something considerably better than that, which is where it went.

The edict worked. Six hundred years later the Côte d'Or is pinot noir and chardonnay almost exclusively, and the apparent purity of the region (two grapes, one hillside) reads as though it were inevitable.

It was not. It is the result of regulation, repeated and eventually codified into appellation law, and the survivals around the edges are the evidence.

Aligoté is the most significant. Burgundy's other white grape is higher in acidity and lower in prestige, and it was historically banished to the flat land and the tops of slopes; the places chardonnay would not thrive. Its fate was to be mixed with cassis and called kir, named after a mayor of Dijon who promoted it.

A group of growers has spent the last two decades planting it on decent sites and treating it as seriously as chardonnay, and the results have changed how the grape is regarded. The obstacle is regulatory rather than agricultural: aligoté planted in a premier cru cannot be sold as one, so the incentive runs against putting it anywhere good.

Then there is Bourgogne Passe-tout-grains, which requires at least 30% pinot noir and at least 15% gamay in the same wine. It is one of the few places the two are legally permitted to meet, and it was historically what growers drank themselves: made from the young vines, the awkward parcels and whatever the négociant would not buy. A handful of producers now make it seriously, and it remains among the best value in the region precisely because nobody collects it.

Saint-Bris is stranger. This small appellation near Chablis is the only place in Burgundy permitted to make white wine from sauvignon blanc, and it received appellation status in 2003, which is astonishingly recent. It exists because the grape had been grown there long enough that banning it would have destroyed an established practice, so the rules were bent around a historical accident.

And in the Yonne, around Irancy, a few growers maintain césar and sacy. César is a red variety permitted in small proportions in Irancy, adding structure and colour to pinot, and it is demanding to ripen, which is why it nearly disappeared. Sacy is a white grape once widespread in the region and now barely planted.

All of which would be a footnote, except for what is happening to the climate.

Harvest dates in Burgundy have moved forward by roughly two weeks since the 1980s. Alcohol in red Burgundy has risen by around a degree. Budbreak comes earlier, which widens the frost window, and picking decisions that were straightforward now involve a choice between phenolic ripeness and manageable alcohol.

In that context, the qualities that made a variety marginal start to look different. Ripening late is an advantage when the season is longer. Retaining acidity is an advantage when acidity is falling. A grape that struggled in 1975 may be well suited to 2055.

Bordeaux has already authorised new varieties for exactly this reason, permitting six additional grapes on an experimental basis. Burgundy's appellation rules, which specify the permitted varieties commune by commune, make the same move considerably harder.

That is a regulatory problem rather than an agricultural one, and it is the shape of the argument the region is going to be having for the next thirty years.