Gevrey-Chambertin

Gevrey-Chambertin has nine grands crus, more than any other commune in Burgundy, and they sit in a band along the mid-slope either side of the village. Chambertin and Chambertin-Clos de Bèze are the two at the centre. Seven more append the name: Charmes, Mazoyères, Griotte, Chapelle, Latricières, Mazis and Ruchottes.

The ninefold concentration has a cause you can see from a car. The Combe de Lavaux, a large dry valley, cuts into the escarpment just west of the village, and over a very long time it has spread a fan of eroded material out across the slope. The result is that Gevrey's classified band sits on relatively deep, clay-bearing brown limestone soils across an unusually broad stretch of hillside. More clay means more water, more vigour, thicker skins and more tannin. Hence the caricature: Gevrey is iron where Chambolle, three kilometres south on much thinner ground, is lace.

Caricatures about Burgundy survive because they are roughly right about the median bottle and wrong about a great many individual ones. Charmes-Chambertin, sitting downslope towards the road on the deepest soil of the nine, is the softest and earliest-drinking grand cru in the village; nothing ferrous about it. Ruchottes, high and stony against the rock, is the tautest. The commune contains its own internal spread of the same gradient that separates it from its neighbours.

Two pieces of local law are worth carrying. Clos de Bèze may legally be sold as Chambertin; Chambertin may not be sold as Clos de Bèze. The asymmetry records seniority (Clos de Bèze was a monastic vineyard by the seventh century, two hundred years before its neighbour) and in practice nobody exercises the right any more, because Clos de Bèze commands at least as much. Similarly, Mazoyères-Chambertin adjoins Charmes and may be sold under the Charmes name. Most of its owners do, on the entirely commercial grounds that more people can pronounce it. If you want Mazoyères you have to seek out a producer stubborn enough to label it.

Then there is Clos Saint-Jacques, which is the village's standing argument with its own classification. It is a five-hectare walled vineyard on the slope west of the village, divided among five owners, and it produces wine that almost everybody who tastes it considers grand cru in all but name. It is premier cru for a geometric reason: the grand cru band follows one continuous stretch of hillside, and Clos Saint-Jacques sits on the far side of the Combe de Lavaux from it. The line had to go somewhere and it went down the valley.

Its five owners have responded by pricing it at or above several grands crus, which is the market quietly correcting a nineteenth-century map. It is the best single example of the point the classification chapter made in the abstract: the hierarchy is a historical document, and historical documents contain the circumstances of the people who wrote them, including which side of a valley they happened to be standing on.

Gevrey was also, in 1847, the first commune to hyphenate its greatest vineyard onto its own name. Half the Côte followed within a generation: Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanée, Puligny-Montrachet, Aloxe-Corton, Nuits-Saint-Georges. It is excellent marketing and a permanent trap, because it means the cheapest bottle in the village carries a syllable borrowed from the most expensive vineyard in it.