Marsannay and Fixin

The Côte de Nuits does not begin at Gevrey-Chambertin. It begins in the suburbs of Dijon, at Marsannay-la-Côte, and the fact that almost every account starts further south is a convention of the wine trade rather than a fact about the hillside. It has cost the village a great deal.

Marsannay is the only appellation on the Côte d'Or classified for all three colours, and its rosé is the only one on the slope anybody takes seriously. That flexibility is partly historical accident and partly a consequence of having nothing to protect: a village with no grand cru is free to do what suits its ground rather than what suits its reputation. Proximity to Dijon has cost it vineyard steadily since the nineteenth century, to housing and roads, and for a long time the wine was made for the city rather than for export.

The appellation itself dates only from 1987, and for most of its existence it had no premier cru at all, despite several sites that growers had argued for decades deserved them. The campaign to have parcels promoted is still running, and it is the clearest live example available of how the classification is actually revised, slowly, by petition, over decades, and always upwards. Watching it happen teaches more about the system than any account of what the INAO did in the 1930s.

Fixin, immediately south, has proper premiers crus, including Clos de la Perrière and Clos du Chapitre, both walled and both historically monastic. Its reds are firm, tannic, sometimes frankly rustic, and they need a decade. That style is deeply unfashionable, which has kept prices down and rewards anybody willing to wait. It is the clearest case on the Côte of a village penalised for making wine that is not immediately charming.

The reason to care about either is arithmetic. A serious grower's Marsannay costs roughly a fifth of their Gevrey village wine. It is made in the same cellar, by the same hands, with the same decisions about picking and extraction and barrel, from vines a few kilometres away. The ground is genuinely less good and the wine is genuinely less complete. But the gap in the glass is much smaller than the gap on the invoice, because price on the Côte tracks reputation far more closely than it tracks quality.

That observation generalises, and it is the most useful habit available to anybody spending their own money on Burgundy: buy by producer rather than by appellation. If you enjoyed a grower's Gevrey and want more of that character for less, the answer is almost never a different grower's Gevrey. It is the same grower's Marsannay or Fixin, because below grand cru level the cellar hand accounts for more of what is in the glass than fifty metres of slope does.

There is a second reason to look here, which is that the northern end is quietly benefiting from the same warming that is complicating life further south. Sites at the top of the Côte were always a little cooler and a little later, which used to be a disadvantage. Marsannay's reds in the last decade have been riper and more complete than anything the village managed in the 1980s, and nobody has adjusted the prices to reflect it.

The village will eventually get its premiers crus, prices will move, and the opportunity will close. That is what happened to Saint-Aubin, and it is what happens to every quiet corner of the map once enough people say so out loud.