The Sale of the Church Vineyards

In November 1789 the National Assembly nationalised the property of the church, and began selling it at auction to fund a state that had no money. In Burgundy this meant the monastic vineyards, assembled parcel by parcel over seven centuries, coming under the hammer within a few years. It is the single largest transfer of vineyard ownership the region has seen, and nearly every domaine whose holdings date from the early nineteenth century traces them to it.

The buyers were not the people who farmed the land. The sales were at auction, often of whole estates, and they required capital that peasants did not have. What the biens nationaux produced in Burgundy was therefore a change of landlord: the merchants, lawyers and officials of Dijon and Beaune acquired a great deal of the Côte, and the families working it carried on working it. As revolutionary redistributions go it is a fairly clear case of property moving sideways between elites rather than downwards.

This is where the standard story usually compresses two things that should be kept apart. The Revolution changed who owned the vineyards. It did not, by itself, cut them into the fragments that define Burgundy today. The estates were mostly sold whole and stayed whole for a generation or two.

What cut them up was the inheritance regime. Equal division among heirs, applied once a generation for two centuries, turns one estate into eleven holdings and then into eighty. A vineyard bought entire by one merchant family in 1791 is in a dozen hands by 1900 for reasons that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with arithmetic. The mechanism has never stopped running, which is why a single grand cru can have eighty owners and why a very common Burgundian holding is three tenths of a hectare, roughly what a family plot reaches after four or five divisions, and enough to make about one barrel.

That last figure explains more about the modern market than any account of demand from Asia. The scarcity driving grand cru prices is manufactured by inheritance law. There is no mechanism producing more Chambertin, and there is a mechanism producing more owners of less of it each generation, which means smaller and smaller bottlings under increasingly famous names.

The transfer left a second, subtler mark, which is legible on every label. A Burgundy bottle typically carries a family name and a vineyard name, and they belong to different centuries. The vineyard name is usually medieval and frequently monastic. The family name usually records the moment that family acquired the parcel, which for a great many domaines falls somewhere between 1791 and 1850. Reading a Burgundy label is reading two historical layers at once, and knowing which is which tells you a surprising amount about what you are holding.

There is a final irony worth noting. The monastic estates were assembled precisely because an institution does not divide, which is what allowed the distinctions between parcels to be discovered in the first place. The Revolution abolished the institutions and the civil code then guaranteed the division. So the same century produced both the fragmentation that makes Burgundy maddening to buy and the map that makes it worth buying, and the second could not have been drawn under the conditions the first created.