Monopoles and the Divided Vineyard

On the road between Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vosne-Romanée there is a wall. It encloses about fifty hectares running up the slope, and behind it, at the top, sits a sixteenth-century château. The Cistercians began assembling the land in the twelfth century and farmed it as a single property for six hundred years. Every bottle from inside that wall may be labelled Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru.

There are roughly eighty owners.

The Revolution confiscated and sold the monastic estates, and the Napoleonic code did the rest. Equal division among heirs, applied for two centuries to land nobody would willingly sell, produces the present situation: parcels measured in tenths of a hectare, rows changing hands twice within fifty metres, an 'estate' consisting of thirty scattered fragments across eight communes. A grower with two hectares in total may hold pieces of nine appellations.

Clos de Vougeot is the extreme case and it exposes something important. The ground inside that wall is not uniform. At the top, against the château, the soil is thin over rock and drains hard. In the middle it is deeper. At the bottom, near the road, the slope flattens and the ground becomes damp and generous: land that would be classified village anywhere else on the Côte. The boundary was drawn around an abbey's holding, not around a soil type. The monks reportedly blended all three levels together, which is only worth doing if the levels differ.

So a single grand cru appellation covers ground of genuinely unequal quality, farmed by eighty people of genuinely unequal ability, all printing the same words. Clos de Vougeot is consequently the most variable grand cru in Burgundy and frequently the cheapest, and it is the clearest possible demonstration that a classification attached to a boundary cannot guarantee what is in a bottle.

At the opposite pole sits the monopole: an entire climat in one pair of hands. La Romanée, La Tâche, Clos de Tart, La Grande Rue, Clos des Lambrays. The word appears on the label because it is rare enough to be worth saying. What it changes is not quality but interpretability. With one owner there is exactly one version of that wine in existence, so a poor vintage has nowhere to hide and no house style can be averaged away by comparison with rivals. Buying a monopole is buying a single opinion about a piece of ground.

The fragmentation that makes Burgundy maddening to buy from makes it extraordinary to learn from, and this is the part worth taking away. Because eighty people own pieces of Clos de Vougeot and a dozen own pieces of Échezeaux, you can hold the ground constant and vary the human. Line up four Clos de Vougeot from one vintage and the differences between them are, by construction, not differences of terroir. Line up one grower's Chambolle village, premier cru and grand cru and the differences are, by construction, mostly ground.

No region of single-owner châteaux permits either experiment. Burgundy permits both, and it permits them precisely because of a piece of inheritance law that everyone in the region regards as a disaster. It is the most useful accident in wine.