Nuits-Saint-Georges

Nuits-Saint-Georges is the commercial capital of the Côte de Nuits. It gave the region half its name. It has more vineyard than Vosne and Chambolle combined, around forty premiers crus, and a main street of négociant houses. It has no grand cru.

The usual explanation is instructive. When the hierarchy was formalised in the 1930s, the promotion of a parcel required its owners to make a case, to accept lower yields, and to forgo the commercial convenience of a name that already sold. Nuits' merchants were doing perfectly well selling wine under the village name to a market that recognised it. Elsewhere, growers with small holdings and no brand had everything to gain from parcel-level classification. The map we have records who bothered.

Les Saint-Georges, the climat that gave the village its second name, has had a formal promotion case in progress for years, supported by most of its owners. Les Vaucrains beside it has nearly as good a claim. Whether either is elevated matters less than what the attempt reveals: the classification is a legal instrument that can be amended, and amending it requires decades of paperwork and something close to local unanimity. Burgundy changes at the speed of a land registry.

The commune divides cleanly into two halves and this is the most useful thing to know about it. North of the town, the slope is a continuation of Vosne's, and the premiers crus there (Aux Boudots, Aux Murgers, Aux Cras) taste like it: perfumed, silky, finer-boned. South of the town, towards Premeaux, the soil deepens and carries more iron, and Les Saint-Georges, Les Vaucrains, Les Cailles and Les Pruliers give broader, firmer, more savoury wine that takes longer to come round. A single appellation covering both halves means that 'Nuits-Saint-Georges' as a description of style is close to meaningless.

There is an administrative wrinkle too. The neighbouring commune of Premeaux-Prissey has no appellation of its own and sells its wine as Nuits-Saint-Georges, which is where several of the appellation's best-known premiers crus actually sit: Clos de la Maréchale, Clos des Corvées, Clos Arlot. This is not unusual in Burgundy: Flagey-Échezeaux sells as Vosne-Romanée, and similar arrangements exist up and down the Côte. The village name on a label describes a market as often as it describes a map.

Nuits has long carried a reputation for rustic, tannic, slightly coarse wine. That reputation was earned, in an era of late picking, heavy extraction and long ageing in tired wood, and it has been comprehensively revised since the 1990s by a generation picking earlier and handling fruit more gently. The lesson generalises beyond one village: terroir sets a range of possible wines, and winemaking chooses a point within that range. The Nuits of 1975 and the Nuits of today are both entirely faithful to the same ground.

And the absence of a grand cru has one consequence that benefits anybody actually buying wine to drink. A famous grand cru raises the price of everything beneath it; a village with none has nothing pulling its ceiling up. Southern Nuits premiers crus deliver the firm, structured, savoury profile that people mean when they say Côte de Nuits, at prices that have not moved the way Chambolle's and Vosne's have. Nothing about this is secret. It is simply unfashionable, which in wine is usually the same thing as cheap.