Because Nobody Owns Enough

A grower with a third of a hectare of village Volnay has perhaps fifteen hundred bottles a year from that parcel.

They cannot justify a press, a temperature-controlled cellar, a bottling line, a label designer, an export licence and somebody to answer emails from Japan. The economics do not work at that scale, and fragmentation guarantees that a great many holdings are at that scale.

The négociant exists to solve this. A merchant house buys grapes, must or finished wine from many such growers, makes or finishes the wine, and sells it under its own name.

What is bought matters enormously and is almost never stated. Buying grapes gives the house complete control of the winemaking, which means the product is genuinely theirs. Buying finished wine means accepting what somebody else made and deciding only how to raise and blend it. The label will not tell you which, and the house's reputation therefore has to stand in for information the consumer cannot get.

The négociant has a bad name, and it was earned in a period that has ended.

For much of the twentieth century, merchant houses in Beaune and Nuits bought widely, blended freely, and adjusted with wine from considerably further south to produce something with more colour and weight than the Côte could supply in a poor year. This was tolerated, semi-official, and thoroughly damaging to the region's credibility.

The response was domaine bottling. Until the interwar period most Burgundy left the region in barrel; growers began bottling their own, encouraged by American importers (Frank Schoonmaker in the 1930s, Kermit Lynch in the 1970s) who were looking for wines that tasted of somewhere. The appellation system, which made the vineyard name legally meaningful, gave them something to protect.

Power and recognition shifted from the merchant to the grower, and the modern hierarchy of names follows from that shift.

But the structure does not predict the quality, which is the point worth holding onto. The best négociants today buy on long contracts specifying viticulture, yields and picking dates (effectively farming parcels they do not own) and make wine indistinguishable from the top domaines. Meanwhile an indifferent grower bottling their own fruit is still making indifferent wine with their name on it.

The most interesting development is a hybrid that most consumers have never heard of.

Since the 1990s, large numbers of growers have set up separate merchant businesses alongside their domaines, buying fruit to supplement their own. A micro-négoce lets a talented winemaker with two hectares make more wine without buying land at impossible prices, and lets them work with parcels they could never own.

The wines are usually labelled distinctly from the domaine bottlings, and some of the most interesting wine in Burgundy now comes from these operations. It is a quiet structural change of considerable significance and it is nearly invisible to somebody reading a label.

One last piece of the structure, which accounts for a great deal of the wine anybody actually drinks.

Cooperatives vinify for many small growers, particularly in the Mâconnais and in Chablis. La Chablisienne and the Cave de Lugny handle a substantial proportion of their regions' production, which makes them among the largest producers in Burgundy and almost entirely absent from discussions of it.

They are the reason very small growers in less prestigious appellations can stay in business at all, and the reason Mâcon is affordable. A region romanticised for its individual growers depends, at its base, on a great deal of collective processing that nobody writes about.