Divided Every Generation

Clos de Vougeot is fifty hectares behind a stone wall, planted by the Cistercians and completed in the fourteenth century. It was, for six hundred years, a single vineyard belonging to a single owner.

It now has roughly eighty owners, farming parcels that in some cases amount to a few rows.

Two events did this, and the second is still doing it.

The first was the Revolution. Church and noble holdings were confiscated as biens nationaux and auctioned, and the Cistercians and Benedictines who had spent six centuries identifying, walling and mapping the best sites lost all of it in the 1790s. The land went mostly to local merchants, lawyers and growers rather than to peasants, which established the pattern of small private proprietors rather than a few large estates.

The second was the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which required that an estate be divided equally among all children. Before it, a holding could pass intact to one heir; afterwards it could not.

Run that arithmetic for two centuries and a coherent vineyard becomes a mosaic. Four children in each of six generations is a great many parcels, and although marriages and purchases recombine some of it, the direction of travel is overwhelmingly toward fragmentation.

The consequence for anybody reading a label is fundamental and constantly underestimated. The appellation names a place. It does not name a producer, and in a grand cru shared among dozens of owners, the same words on two bottles can mean wines of entirely different quality, made from adjacent rows, in the same year.

The exceptions are the monopoles, where one owner holds an entire climat (La Tâche, La Romanée, Clos de Tart, Clos des Lambrays) and they are rare enough to be listed and priced accordingly.

There is a further layer that is invisible on the label, and it explains some otherwise puzzling coincidences.

Under a métayage arrangement (sharecropping) one party farms another's vines and keeps an agreed proportion of the crop, returning the rest to the owner. Each then makes and sells their own wine. So two bottles of the same vineyard and vintage from different producers can come from the identical rows in the identical year, differing only in what happened after the fruit left the field.

For anybody interested in how much of a wine is the ground and how much is the person, these pairs are the closest thing the region offers to a controlled experiment, and they are not advertised.

The problem now is arithmetic of a different kind.

Grand cru land in the Côte d'Or has changed hands at prices that no plausible return on wine could service. The buyers are therefore not treating it as a business: luxury groups, foreign investors and insurance funds hold it as an asset, and the wine is a by-product of owning something scarce.

For families, the consequence is severe. French inheritance tax is assessed on market value, and the market value of a few rows of grand cru can exceed what a lifetime of farming it would earn. An heir can be unable to afford to inherit.

The response has been structural. A groupement foncier agricole separates ownership of the land from the business that farms it, allowing shares to be transferred gradually and taxed more favourably than an outright sale. Devices of this kind are now essential rather than clever, and several famous parcels have nonetheless left the families that built their reputations, because the sums did not work.

Which produces the odd position Burgundy is now in. A system designed two centuries ago to prevent the concentration of land has produced holdings so valuable that only the very concentrated can afford to buy them.