Vosne-Romanée

There is a stretch of mid-slope in Vosne-Romanée, perhaps eight hundred metres across, that contains six grands crus in an unbroken block: Romanée-Conti, La Romanée, La Tâche, Richebourg, Romanée-Saint-Vivant and La Grande Rue. Two more, Échezeaux and Grands Échezeaux, lie just north in the commune of Flagey. No comparable concentration of expensive ground exists anywhere in agriculture.

The first practical problem is the names. Romanée-Conti, La Romanée and Romanée-Saint-Vivant are three separate grand cru appellations with three separate owners, and the similarity has sold a great deal of the wrong bottle to people who were not paying attention. Romanée-Conti is a monopole of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, as is La Tâche. La Romanée, at 0.85 hectares, is the smallest appellation in France and a monopole of Comte Liger-Belair. Romanée-Saint-Vivant is shared.

The second is that not all of it is equally good, which is a strange sentence to write about this particular hillside but remains true. Échezeaux runs to about thirty-seven hectares and gathers eleven separately named sub-parcels under one appellation, farmed by dozens of producers on ground of visibly different character. Grands Échezeaux beside it is a quarter the size and consistently finer. If the pyramid were redrawn today, nobody would draw Échezeaux the way it is drawn, but the pyramid is not redrawn today, which is rather the point.

Except, occasionally, it is. La Grande Rue is a narrow strip running between La Tâche and Romanée-Conti, which is about as good an address as exists, and until 1992 it was classified premier cru. Its owner, Domaine Lamarche, pressed the case for decades and eventually won. It had been premier cru not because anyone thought the ground inferior but because its previous owners had never fought for more. The promotion is the useful corrective to the idea that the classification is frozen: it moves, very slowly, when somebody pushes hard enough for long enough.

Vosne's reputation rests on a phrase the nineteenth-century writer Camille Rodier gave it: il n'y a pas de vins communs à Vosne. There are no common wines in Vosne. It is a marketing line that happens to have survived scrutiny, for a geographical reason. The commune has essentially no flat land on the hill side of the road; even its village-classification parcels sit among or immediately below the classified band. This is why Vosne village wine is the most expensive village wine in Burgundy, and why it is also, in good hands, one of the few village bottlings that genuinely tastes like a scaled-down version of its neighbours rather than a different wine.

The style, if a style can be attributed across so much ground and so many producers, is spice: a warm, exotic, cinnamon-and-clove character over red fruit, with a texture that manages to be both fine and substantial. How much of that is soil, how much is a shared local tradition of vinification, and how much is the expectation of people who have paid a great deal of money, is a question the region does not much enjoy being asked.

For a drinker with a normal budget, the honest advice about Vosne is that the grands crus are a spectator sport and the premiers crus are where the education is. Aux Malconsorts runs along La Tâche's southern boundary; Les Suchots, Les Beaux Monts and Aux Brûlées are all on the same band. They cost a great deal less than the appellations twenty metres away, for reasons that are historical rather than geological.