Coche, Roulot, Lafon, Raveneau

The best argument in Burgundy that the maker is a real variable does not require any theory. It requires two bottles. Take a Meursault from Coche-Dury and a Meursault from Roulot, from the same vintage, and put them side by side. Same village. Same grape. Same limestone. Vineyards within walking distance of each other. Two wines that nobody would confuse for a moment.

Coche-Dury's style is deliberately reductive: struck-match and smoke over dense fruit, produced by long ageing on the lees with very little oxygen. Reduction is normally a fault, and here it is the signature: the aromas that would be a problem in another cellar are cultivated and held in balance against the weight of the fruit underneath. It is divisive and it is very widely imitated, frequently badly, because the technique without the underlying material produces a wine that smells of matches and nothing else.

Roulot goes the other way entirely. Precision and cut: earlier picking, restraint with oak, and a citric clarity that shows the differences between Meursault's parcels unusually plainly. Where one domaine builds a house style that sits over the vineyards, the other tries to get out of their way. Both are serious, both are admired, and they have taken opposite decisions about what a great white Burgundy is for.

Comtes Lafon holds the classical middle ground, richer and rounder than either, and between the three of them you have a map of what a single village can support. The comparison does not refute terroir, and it is worth being precise about that. All three wines are recognisably Meursault, and each producer's range shows the parcel differences within it. What the comparison refutes is the stronger claim that the ground determines the wine. It puts a rough number on how much room the maker has, and that room is considerably larger than the romantic account of Burgundy allows.

Raveneau belongs in this chapter for a different reason. Chablis is routinely described as the fresh, inexpensive, straightforward end of chardonnay, which is accurate about a great deal of what the region produces and badly wrong about the top of it. Grand cru from a serious grower is dense, saline and extremely long-lived, it ages for decades, and it costs a fraction of equivalent Côte de Beaune. It is the standing rebuke to anybody who treats the appellation as a starting point rather than a summit.

That mispricing is available to anybody who knows about it, which makes it the most practical thing in this chapter. A buyer who wants white Burgundy that will still be interesting in twenty years, on a fixed budget, should be looking at Chablis grand cru rather than at village wine from a famous commune. The region's general reputation depresses prices at the top along with everything else, and buying where a reputation is wrong is the most reliable value strategy in wine.

One technical note that follows from all of this. Since reduction can be a deliberate style, a reflexive judgement about it is worthless. Mild reduction is admired in several of the most celebrated white Burgundies; severe reduction, which does not blow off and smells of drains rather than matches, is a fault. Telling them apart in a young wine is genuinely hard, and a great deal of confident tasting-note writing pretends otherwise. Being willing to say that you cannot yet tell is a mark of a better palate than being willing to pronounce.