As I write these words of introduction, I am borne along by the still-glowing memory of a remarkable Musigny grand cru enjoyed with friends less than 24 hours ago. Made by Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier and from the 2008 vintage, it sang a gustatory aria that captured, better than any words can, the magnificence of a great Côte d’Or red wine.
Côte d’Or is famed and fabled yet so diminutive in scale that it might be considered an inverted iceberg; a vast worldwide reputation, centuries in the making, is supported by a tiny base. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have been flown up and down the côte on several occasions by friends who own a light aircraft. Only then did I fully appreciate its tiny geographic imprint.
To expand that appreciation, feet must also be placed on the ground to gain knowledge of the remarkably varied geological base on which the côte rests. Walking the vineyards, alert to the warp and weft of the slope, the subtle changes in aspect and elevation, soil and subsoil, is the surest route to an understanding of why such vinous variety can be found in so compact a region.
Which leads me to conclude with something of an apology and a piece of heartfelt advice. The words below can give only a flavor of the region that I consider the wine world’s greatest. I hope they stir an interest that will eventually lead to a visit to Burgundy. If they do, my advice runs thus: more than anything else, do what is possible only when you are in situ—visit the vineyards. Wander and wonder. Too often, wine lovers’ visits to the Côte d’Or become a packed schedule of cellar tastings, with vineyard visits tacked on almost as an afterthought. This approach should be flipped, giving primacy to the vineyards.
In short: go visit!
–Raymond Blake
The Côte d’Or, the Golden Slope, enjoys a reputation and exerts an influence in the wine world out of all proportion to its size. It possesses none of the grandeur of the Douro Valley, for instance, nor the picture-postcard beauty of South Africa’s wine lands. It is not majestic; its beauty is serene, and what strikes the observer time and again is the tiny scale. From north to south it is about 50 kilometers long, it is sometimes less than a kilometer wide, and it can be driven in little more than an hour. At a push it could be walked in a day. Yet for a thousand or more years this favored slope has yielded wines that have entranced and delighted wine lovers, with a fair measure of frustration and disappointment thrown in, too.
Greater Burgundy is a bigger, more geographically diverse region than might first be supposed, stretching from Chablis, southeast of Paris, to Beaujolais, north of Lyon. The subject matter of this book, however, is Burgundy’s heart, the Côte d’Or. There is no more celebrated stretch of agricultural land on earth. It has been pored over and analyzed, feted and cosseted, obsessed about and sought after for centuries, and today, if anything, it exerts a greater pull on wine lovers than ever before. “Astronomical” does not begin to describe the prices now being paid for prized patches of grand and premier cru vineyard, and for the wines produced from them by the top domains. Such prices hog the headlines and paint a dazzling, though severely one-dimensional, picture of the Côte d’Or today. In the early years of the twenty-first century they are part of the story but they are not the only part.
The Côte d’Or has been the subject of forensic scrutiny for centuries, generating a library of books, so why another one now? For the simple reason that it is ever-changing. Every year sees new names added to the producers’ roster and old ones slipping away, and thanks to this ongoing evolution, the infant domain of today can be the superstar of tomorrow.
Seen from the air, tracing its course southward from Dijon, the Côte d’Or appears as little more than a ripple on the earth’s surface, bracketed by dark green forest on the hilltops and, in late July, golden fields of just-cut corn on the plain. Flying at a couple of hundred meters above ground, it is possible to appreciate the mazelike intricacy of vineyard boundaries, with the plots of vines interlocking like jigsaw pieces, laced with spindly roads and narrow tracks. You must maintain a fixed gaze, however; glance to right or left and there isn’t a vineyard to be seen. Though expected, the tiny scale is the biggest revelation—the côte is diminutive yet brilliant. The colors are more varied than expected, vivid greens of different shades and intensity depending on the row orientation, interspersed with less verdant patches of fallow land. There are splotches of brown, too, where a vineyard is awaiting replanting.
The Burgundians enjoy their wines with notably less ceremony than attends the broaching of a grand old Bordeaux, so a leaf taken from their book is the best starting point when considering details of service and presentation. Beware of oversanctification and undue ceremony—they get in the way of enjoyment—but be prepared to make an effort, as a good Burgundy warrants thorough assessment. Above all, pay attention to the wine; don’t treat it like background music; put it center stage to be tasted receptively.
Nerdy accumulation of detail and facts relating to viticulture and winemaking may help in appreciating wine. They also may not. They may obscure the wine itself in a “wood for the trees” way. It is like tasting a great dish—boeuf bourguignon comes to mind—and then trying to describe it by identifying and listing all the ingredients. We don’t rate a car by listing its components, so why do it with wine? It is the combination and interplay between all the diverse elements and influences that make wine endlessly fascinating. We should pay attention to that, the interplay and harmony, the overall picture, and not the paint used in it.
Some villages are easier to identify than others, and the relative sprawl of Gevrey-Chambertin signals the beginning of the great sweep of grand cru vineyards that crosses six communes. There is a blip as the village of Chambolle-Musigny interposes itself between Bonnes-Mares and Musigny. Tucked into the rocky hillside, it might be missed were it not for its distinctive church tower.
The squat block of the Château du Clos de Vougeot sits within its clos, and together they dwarf the adjacent eponymous village. The grand expanse of the clos is in marked contrast to the minute monopoles of Vosne-Romanée that follow. More than ever the tiny scale is apparent here—Vosne is not easily spotted and passes in a blink; the straight avenue of trees leading in from the D974 is a good marker. Nuits-Saint-Georges is a grand metropolis by comparison and looks like an urban wedge driven into the vine-clad slope. A thin wisp of vineyard then threads its way through and around stone quarries before the hill of Corton announces the start of the Côte de Beaune. As on the ground, the hill is the most significant feature on the côte, though its imposing ground-level form is reduced to an egg-shaped mound. From above, what’s easiest to appreciate is the varied aspect of the vines, from east facing to west facing as they sweep around the hillside, receiving a different ration of sunlight depending on location.
A ribbon of blacktop cuts the côte north of Beaune as the A6, the Autoroute du Soleil, snakes through before turning hard right in search of southern sun. Beaune sprawls at the bottom of its slope of premiers crus, the incline looking almost flat from the air. Then Pommard segues into Volnay in a trice, the latter signaled by the broad front of Pousse d’Or and looking even more neatly wedded to a pocket in the slope than it does from the ground. Meursault is bigger than the surrounding villages and calls attention to itself by size and location, centered on a small hill and flagged by the tall mairie, with its polychrome roof in an unusual combination of yellow, green, and black.
Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet come next, coclaimants to Montrachet. From the air everything written about it occupying the perfect position on the midslope resolves into clarity. Montrachet sits like the filling in a sandwich, an oblong strip, measuring some 600 meters by 130 meters and covering 8 hectares, with satellite vineyards on either side. If the vines represented seats in a stadium, these would be in the corporate boxes. Chassagne is easily spotted, sitting slightly downslope from a quarry, and then the côte turns through Santenay and Maranges to a jumbled finish. Two markers highlight Santenay: the multicolored roof of the château and the spire of the church, a tall slate needle. The topography is more varied here, less regular than farther north, a mélange of topsy-turvy slopes, the hilltops touching 500 meters, with the odd vineyard up to 450 meters. It is easy to see the change in vineyard exposure as it swings from almost due east to fully south at Maranges, though there are individual exceptions on the irregular terrain.
Traveling by light plane, the Côte d’Or is traversed in a matter of minutes. From north to south, it is embroidered with millions of vines and punctuated by villages where, tucked behind high walls, there are more swimming pools than expected.
In the simplest layman’s terms, the Côte d’Or can be described as a tear in the earth’s surface caused by vertical slippage that exposed a multiplicity of different types of limestone from the Jurassic period. In addition, the resultant gentle slope faces roughly east toward the rising sun, a combination that has proved ideal for the cultivation of the vine. The whole area was once under a shallow inland sea and the climate was tropical. It was teeming with marine life, such as oysters and other shellfish, and as they died their remains settled on the seabed over the course of many millennia, gradually building layer after layer and eventually forming the limestone basis of today’s côte. In time, the sea receded, and, about twenty to thirty million years ago, the forces that created mountain ranges such as today’s Alps also led to the formation of the slope we call the Côte d’Or. The côte forms the western edge of the Saône valley and generally lies at an altitude of between 200 and 400 meters. The D974 road roughly traces the divide between slope and valley; all the great vineyards lie west of it, and there the underlying bedrock sits just below the surface soil. In places, some enthusiastic digging with a spade would soon reveal it, whereas on the eastern side, it could be over 100 meters beneath the surface.
The geological fault that created the côte acted like a cut across a multidecker sandwich, whose layers have eroded and weathered to yield the complicated pattern of clay limestone (argilo-calcaire) soil types seen today. The côte may have started life as a reasonably homogeneous slope, but further complication comes from two other influences. The layers were compressed from north to south, so that they have been pushed upward in the Côte de Nuits and have sagged at the beginning of the Côte de Beaune, to emerge again at Santenay. Additionally, the effect of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, was to create breaks and irregularities in the côte—les combes—the side valleys that run roughly perpendicular to it. Out of these have spilt deposits of stone and soil that add further complexity to the côte’s soils.
The most favored vineyards lie in the midriff of the slope at an altitude of about 250 meters, where is found the best combination of drainage, soil, subsoil, and exposure. The geology of each site imprints the same stamp on a wine year after year, unlike, for instance, the weather or the winemaking, both of which can change markedly or merely by nuance. All other influences are mutable; changes in geology are measured in millions of years. Whether it imprints a stamp of minerality on the wine and whether that can be tasted, and used as a valid tasting term, is a currently raging debate in the wine world. The upper hand resides with the scientists who assert that the influence of minerals in the soil cannot be tasted in the wine. Yet minerality is a term I am happy to use, and, when others use it, I know what they mean. It’s a bedfellow of acidity but broader and less penetrating and less apt to produce a flow of saliva.
It takes only passing knowledge of the côte’s pattern, or lack of pattern, to understand why adjacent, superficially similar climats can yield radically different wines. The vineyard mosaic endows the côte with enduring fascination for wine lovers, frequently leavened with helpless frustration. It’s a sweeping statement, but thanks to its geology no other wine region can engage and confound like the Côte d’Or.
It was always said without qualification that Burgundy lay at the northern limit for the production of great red wine in Europe, and, while that is still largely true, in decades to come the same assertion might be made for Alsace or Germany’s Ahr or Pfalz regions. The forty-seventh parallel runs through the Côte d’Or, a fraction south of Beaune, placing it well to the north of Burgundy’s traditional Gallic rival, Bordeaux. Being at the margin for proper ripening of grapes is an advantage and a disadvantage: the long growing season favors the development of subtle and complex flavors, while in a poor vintage the grapes might not ripen properly, resulting in vapid, charmless wines.
The Côte d’Or has a moderate continental climate. Winters are generally cold and summers generally hot, but within that sweeping summary there can be great variation. Some winters never get properly cold, remaining gray and damp with little frost, and some summers muddle along with too much rain and not enough sun. Extreme conditions play their part, too: spring frosts can wreak destruction on the nascent crop, while summer hailstorms can cause devastation, usually highly localized. Both of these scourges have struck with distressing frequency in recent years. In addition, extreme summer temperatures over an extended period can cause the vines to shut down, interrupting the ripening process, as happened in 2003, and heavy rain at harvest can cause the vines to suck up water, swelling the grapes and diluting the juice.
Whether climate change is responsible for the increased variability of the weather and the incidence of catastrophic frosts or storms is impossible to say, but, leaving those aside, most vignerons are agreed that its influence so far has been for the good, resulting in earlier and riper harvests. It is possible that the côte’s climate is in a period of transition, with no certainty of what is to come. It may settle into a new norm or remain in the jumble we are now witnessing. If climate change leads to weather chaos, then the recently surmounted challenge of reviving the overfertilized, moribund vineyards may yet pale beside the challenges posed by it.
All the above remains broadly true today, but the “jumble” might now be described as a patchwork quilt of different periods of weather, rather than a steady progression of seasons. Recent vintages, since the first edition of this book, have seen extreme heat, drought, incessant rain, spring frost, and summer hail, warm winters and cool summers, very early harvests, and various “once-in-a-lifetime” weather events that have come about with distressing regularity. In paraphrase, “We could make a plan if we knew what to plan for” has been the response from numerous winemakers when asked how they plan to cope with the ever-evolving climate of the Côte d’Or.
This excerpt first appeared in Côte d’Or: The Wines and Winemakers of the Heart of Burgundy, written by Raymond Blake and published by Académie du Vin Library in December 2025. It has been minimally edited for style, length, and audience. Used with permission.
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