A Hospital That Became an Estate

In 1443 Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Duke of Burgundy, founded a hospital for the poor in Beaune. The Hôtel-Dieu is still there, with its polychrome tiled roof, and it is one of the most photographed buildings in France.

Rolin endowed it with vineyard land. So did the next donor, and the one after that, and people have been leaving vines to the Hospices de Beaune for five hundred and eighty years.

The result is a holding of around sixty hectares, much of it premier cru and grand cru, assembled entirely by accident. Nobody designed this portfolio. It is the aggregate of hundreds of unconnected decisions by people who had been treated there, or expected to be, or whose family had been.

That history is why the cuvées carry people's names rather than vineyard names. Cuvée Nicolas Rolin, Cuvée Guigone de Salins, Cuvée Docteur Peste: each commemorates a donor, and each may be assembled from parcels in several different climats. It is a naming system that follows the bequests rather than the geography, which is unique in the region and confuses everybody at first.

The wine is sold at auction on the third Sunday of November, and the format is what makes it unusual.

Buyers purchase barrels, not bottles. The wine is young, unfinished, and a couple of months old. The buyer takes it away and decides everything that happens next: how long in barrel, how much new oak, whether to rack, fine or filter, when to bottle.

So the same Hospices cuvée from the same vintage appears under many different names, from many different cellars, and tastes appreciably different depending on who raised it. For anybody interested in how much élevage contributes, this is about as close to a controlled experiment as the wine world offers: identical vineyard, identical vintage, identical winemaking until November, and then divergence.

It also makes auction prices a poor guide to what is in any particular bottle, which does not stop them being reported as one.

The auction is the centrepiece of Les Trois Glorieuses, three days that function as the region's annual gathering. Saturday is a dinner at Clos de Vougeot hosted by the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, in costume. Sunday is the auction. Monday is La Paulée de Meursault, a lunch where growers bring their own old bottles to share and which runs for many hours.

Every year the auction total is reported as a verdict on the vintage, and every year this is a mistake.

Prices are driven by the charitable purpose, by how much publicity the event has attracted, by the size of the crop, by the mood of the fine wine market, and by which celebrity is presiding over the sale of the Pièce des Présidents, the single barrel auctioned for an additional charity. A frost-reduced vintage with very little wine can fetch strong prices on scarcity and sentiment alone.

It is a charity gala with a wine auction attached, held before anybody has tasted a finished bottle, and it is read as a market signal because it happens to be the first number available.

None of which diminishes what it is. The proceeds fund a modern hospital serving the Beaune area, the estate is farmed to a high standard, and a fifteenth-century charitable institution that turned into one of the most valuable vineyard holdings in the world, by the accumulated generosity of people who mostly could not have imagined what the land would be worth, is a genuinely good story.