The Duke Who Banned Gamay

In July 1395 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, issued an order that gamay be torn out of the good slopes of the Côte. The language is worth quoting because it is so blunt: a very bad and disloyal plant, from which comes a great abundance of wine. Two charges, and only one of them is about quality.

Abundance is the giveaway. The complaint is not principally that the wine tasted bad in itself; it is that gamay ripened reliably, yielded several times as much as pinot noir, and was therefore the rational planting for any grower who had just come through a bad decade. A flood of cheap, generous Burgundy was undermining the price and the reputation of the good wine, and the duke intervened.

Which makes the edict a rather modern document. It is a regulator acting against the immediate private interest of producers in order to protect a common asset that none of them individually owns. The reputation of a region is exactly that kind of asset: every grower has an incentive to cash in on it while everybody else maintains it, and the arrangement collapses unless somebody enforces the maintenance. You do not prohibit what nobody wants to do, and the existence of the ban is the best evidence we have that gamay was being planted enthusiastically on the best land because it paid.

The reason a duke cared is political. The Valois dukes ran a state that rivalled the French crown, stretching from Burgundy to Flanders, and wine was one of its instruments, sent to popes, kings and courts as an announcement of what the territory produced. With the papacy at Avignon for much of the fourteenth century, Burgundy had a wealthy near neighbour with a taste for its wine and no shortage of money, which is a good deal of why the Côte's reputation travelled at all. A name for thin, abundant wine was a diplomatic cost as much as a commercial one.

It is the earliest clear case of a public authority protecting a regional name for reasons of prestige, and the logic has not changed since. A named region, a named variety, an authority with power to enforce the link, and a stated purpose of defending the name against debasement. When the INAO codified the French appellation system in the 1930s it was formalising a practice Burgundy had run intermittently for five and a half centuries. The rule that keeps gamay in Beaujolais and out of the Côte d'Or today is directly descended from this edict.

The cost fell on the growers, and it is worth not glossing over it. Gamay was the sensible planting for somebody farming a small parcel with no reserves, and the ban took that option away. Six hundred years of enforcement have produced a hillside of enormous value and a body of wine nobody has managed to copy; they also made a great many individual fourteenth-century farmers poorer. Whether the trade was worth making depends entirely on who is asked and when, and the people who paid for it are not available for comment.

The same argument runs today in every region where a high-yielding variety is reliable income for growers and a threat to the name. Nothing about it has been solved. It is a commons problem, it does not resolve itself, and the only demonstrated answer is an authority willing to impose a cost on the people it governs. Burgundy is the longest-running experiment in doing that, and the wine on the slope is the result.