Demystifying ‘Grand Cru’

Part 3: Burgundy

The first two parts of this series looked at Bordeaux’s two main classification systems - the Médoc and Saint-Émilion. Slightly different in their execution but both ultimately rank the individual châteaux, as opposed to the land.

North east of Bordeaux, however, in the Burgundy region, things are different. The ‘Grand Cru’ classification belongs to the land and the resulting terroir, rather than the producer. So what does this mean for the wines?

Time for a little history lesson.

Napoleon, having crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804, believed a hereditary empire was more stable than a fleeting dictatorship. He decided he needed an heir to ensure his regime would survive his death so when his first wife was unable to bear children, he remarried Marie-Louise of Austria who gave birth to a son. Napoleon had strong feelings on inheritance and legacy and decided to introduce laws that decreed land in France would be divided equally amongst all children, rather than the incumbent laws that stated the eldest son would inherit everything. The aim of these new laws was to dismantle inherited aristocratic power and enforce legal equality, ensuring wealth filtered down across all children rather than being controlled by a singular heir. This, in turn, would break up large estates and reduce the power of generational wealth in favour of a merit-based society.

What did this mean for Burgundy? Over time, large estates were indeed broken down and shared amongst multiple heirs, with each generation splitting up vineyard area until growers owned tiny parcels in a singular vineyard - some comprising only a few rows of vines. Although Napoleon’s inheritance laws were the same across France, not every region saw this fragmentation of vineyards like Burgundy did. For example, in Bordeaux, the châteaux were owned by wealthy families who incorporated their estates, effectively splitting them across a system of shareholders who were not subject to the same inheritance laws that individuals were.

Why is this relevant to the ‘Grand Cru’ classification? Well, this goes back to the fact that Grand Cru status in Burgundy is related to vineyard site, rather than producer. The nuanced terroir in Burgundy has been characterised by 150-200 million years of geological history: tectonic plate shifts created the Saône valley with its steep slopes and varying aspects; glacial erosion washed down debris from to create intricate mosaics of soil types and Jurassic period seas left distinctive marine fossil sediments. This has left intricate patterns of terroir, that gives character to over 1,000 defined plots or 'climats' and dozens of overarching appellations, which in turn translates to the wine that is made there.

Grand Cru sites are usually mid-slope, benefitting from the ‘Goldilocks’ spot of perfect conditions - poor, nutrient deficient, free-draining soils with maximum sunlight interception, both protected from frosts on the valley floor and windy conditions at the top of the slope. 

But site is only only factor in the making of a great wine. Since one Grand Cru vineyard can be owned by multiple growers (sometimes even hundreds), the final quality of the wine depends just as much on the producer as the site the wine has come from. The exception to this is the few monopoles that exist, such as Romanée Conti and La Tâche, which are solely owned and therefore produced by Domaine de la Romanée Conti, and are therefore guaranteed top quality (with prices to match).

Burgundy’s vineyard-focused hierarchy is also the reason behind its distinctive double-barrelled place names. Communes such as Gevrey, Chambolle and Vosne added the name of their most prestigious Grand Cru vineyard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way of signalling quality and origin. Gevrey became Gevrey-Chambertin, Chambolle became Chambolle-Musigny and Vosne became Vosne-Romanée, directly linking the identity of the village to its most celebrated site. 

In conclusion, unlike Bordeaux, where château names act as brands, in Burgundy it is the vineyard name that carries prestige, with producers borrowing reputation from place rather than the other way around. Terroir defines the potential of the final wine but ultimately it is in the hands of the producer to realise its final quality.