Saint-Aubin and the Back Valleys

Saint-Aubin lies in the valley behind Chassagne and Puligny, on the same continuous limestone, several dozen metres higher and correspondingly cooler. Its best premier cru, En Remilly, is separated from Le Montrachet by a road and a few metres of altitude. An unusually high proportion of the commune is classified premier cru, which is partly a historical quirk and partly recognition that the ordinary land is genuinely good.

For about thirty years it was where the wine trade bought its own white Burgundy. That is a specific and reliable signal: not what merchants recommend, which reflects what they have to sell, but what they drink at home, which reflects what they think is underpriced. The secret is now thoroughly out. Prices have roughly tripled in fifteen years.

Nothing about the wine changed. The trade talked about it, then the press did, then the prices moved. That sequence is the whole mechanism by which value appellations stop being value appellations, and it is worth understanding because it is entirely predictable and completely unstoppable. Any published answer to the question of what will be the next Saint-Aubin is partly self-defeating, which is not a reason to avoid asking; it is a reason to go and taste rather than to read.

The ingredients are always the same. Good geology, usually continuous with somewhere famous. A cool aspect or a higher elevation, which was a handicap when the binding constraint was ripeness and has become an asset now that it is not. A village with no flagship name and therefore no attention. And a handful of growers doing careful work that nobody has written about.

Auxey-Duresses and Monthelie occupy exactly the same structural position behind Meursault and Volnay: side valleys, higher, cooler, cheaper. Auxey makes both colours; Monthelie is essentially red and is best understood as a leaner Volnay. They are where the value went after Saint-Aubin's prices moved, and they are being noticed now for the same reasons, which means the window on them is already closing.

The arithmetic that makes all of this work is the lapse rate: roughly half a degree of mean temperature per hundred metres of elevation. These villages were classified below their neighbours because they were cooler and later, and in a region where ripeness was the constraint that was a real and permanent disadvantage. The same characteristic now preserves acidity and slows sugar accumulation in vintages where the main slope is fighting heat. The ground did not improve. What it was being measured against changed.

En Remilly against Montrachet is an overstatement that has made a great many people money, and the geography underneath it is real: the two sites are continuous and the boundary between them is administrative. The wine is not Montrachet and does not pretend to be. In a good year from a careful grower it is unmistakably of the same family at a fraction of the price, which is about as good as value gets in white Burgundy, and it is a good deal less good than it was in 2010.