The Premier Cru Rule

There is a trick to Burgundy labels that takes about a minute to learn and saves years of confusion. It is purely grammatical. Look at the place names and count them.

One place name that is a village (Volnay, Meursault, Chambolle-Musigny) means village wine. Two place names, village followed by parcel (Volnay Les Caillerets, Meursault Les Genevrières, Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses) means premier cru. One place name that is not a village (Bâtard-Montrachet, Richebourg, Chambertin) means grand cru, because a grand cru is its own appellation and has no need of a commune.

That is the whole system. Once it is internalised you can place any Burgundy bottle in the hierarchy before you know anything about the wine, the producer or the vintage.

A few wrinkles are worth knowing, because they look like exceptions and are not. A bottle labelled 'Volnay Premier Cru' with no parcel named is perfectly legitimate: it is a blend of several premier cru parcels within the same commune. Growers do this because fragmentation leaves them with a tenth of a hectare here and a fifth there, which makes one barrel rather than three. Some of these blends are excellent and they are usually cheaper than the named climat they would otherwise be diluting. A bottle carrying a village name that is hyphenated (Gevrey-Chambertin, Puligny-Montrachet, Vosne-Romanée) is still a village wine; the second half of the name is a grand cru the village annexed for marketing purposes in the nineteenth century, and it tells you nothing about what is in the bottle.

The harder point is that premier cru is a very broad band. There are more than six hundred premier cru climats across the Côte d'Or, and they were classified at a particular moment by particular people working from a map. Some of them are unarguably of grand cru standard and everybody knows it. Chambolle's Les Amoureuses sits immediately below Musigny and outprices several grands crus. Gevrey's Clos Saint-Jacques is excluded from the grand cru band for the geometric reason that it sits across a small valley from it. Vosne's Aux Malconsorts runs along La Tâche's boundary. Meanwhile other premiers crus are premier cru principally because a line had to go somewhere and this was the far side of it.

This is where new buyers develop their first genuine heresy, and it is correct. Given a village wine from a celebrated grower and a premier cru from an unknown one at the same price, the village wine is usually the better bet. One step of the pyramid is a real difference, but the gap between careful and careless farming (yields, picking date, sorting, extraction, oak, sulphur) is frequently larger than one step. The region half-admits this in its own structure: the climat tells you what was possible, and the name underneath tells you what was done.

None of which means the classification is worthless. It is an extraordinarily detailed record of where, across fifty kilometres of hillside, people have repeatedly found that wine is better. It simply cannot do the second job it is often asked to do, which is to tell you which bottle on a shelf to buy. For that you need the other half of the label, and the other half of the label requires you to have done some homework.