The Slopes That Are Suddenly Good

The classification of the Côte d'Or is a claim about ground. It is also, inescapably, a claim about the climate over that ground, because the reason mid-slope east-facing parcels were ranked highest is that they ripened, and ripening was the binding constraint for five hundred years. The cold high ground and the flat valley floor did not, and were classified accordingly.

The constraint has moved. The Hautes-Côtes (the plateau and side valleys above the escarpment, two to three hundred metres higher and several degrees cooler) were historically marginal, which is a polite way of saying the fruit often did not get there. They now ripen reliably. Land nobody wanted has become genuinely interesting, and prices have followed, though they remain a fraction of the Côte proper. It is the closest thing to an arbitrage the region currently offers.

The useful number here is the lapse rate: roughly half a degree of mean temperature per hundred metres of elevation. It is one of the few reliable figures in the whole conversation and it lets a grower think about the hillside quantitatively. A parcel a hundred and fifty metres above the classified slope is doing something like the job the classified slope did thirty years ago. That arithmetic is behind every purchase of high ground in the last decade, and behind the commercial planting of pinot noir and chardonnay in England, Denmark and the Jura, which is the same phenomenon at a continental scale.

Aspect has flipped in the same way. North-facing parcels were worth little when the problem was catching sun; less direct sun means slower ripening and retained acidity, which is precisely what everybody on the warmer slopes is now trying to hold on to. Pernand-Vergelesses, which wraps round the cold side of the Corton hill, is the clearest single beneficiary anywhere on the Côte. A site classified as too cold now ripens and still keeps its acidity, which is the combination the whole region is chasing.

So the obvious question is whether the classification can respond, and the answer is effectively no. In principle the INAO can reclassify, and occasionally does: almost always upwards, and almost always after decades of petitioning. Marsannay's campaign for premier cru status is the live example. Revaluing a parcel downwards is politically impossible, because the classification is a property right worth a great deal of money and its owners vote. The map is frozen against exactly the kind of change the climate is producing.

It is important to be precise about what this does and does not mean. The grand crus are not going to stop being good ground. Their drainage, their depth of soil, their exposure and their stone are real and are not going anywhere, and the wines from them in recent vintages have been magnificent. What is shifting is part of the reason they were selected, and there is no mechanism by which a map fixed in the 1930s can register the shift.

The practical consequence for a drinker is smaller and more cheerful. A Beaune merchant now recommends a Hautes-Côtes red for drinking rather than for economy, and that recommendation means something it did not mean twenty years ago. For most of the twentieth century a Hautes-Côtes wine was what you bought when you could not afford the slope, and it usually tasted like it. The change is in the agriculture rather than in the marketing, which makes it the most honest signal available that the region has genuinely moved.