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Burgundy, known as Bourgogne in French, province of eastern France famous for its great red and white wines produced mostly from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes respectively. The province includes the viticultural regions of the Cote de Nuits and Cote de Beaune in the departement of the Cote d'Or (which had a total of 9,284 ha/22,900 acres of vineyards in 1995), and the Cote Chalonnaise and Maconnais in the Saone-et-Loire (whose total area of vineyards contracted a little in the first half of the 1990s to 10,302 ha).
Beaujolais in the Rhone departement (21,885 ha) and Chablis and the Auxerrois in the Yonne departement (totalling 5,301 ha by 1995, an increase of more than a third since 1990) are distinct regions viticulturally, if not administratively, and are treated separately. When the Romans (see Ancient Rome) conquered Gaul in 51 bc, they probably found the Celts inhabiting what is now Burgundy already growing wine, although definite archaeological evidence for this goes back no further than the 2nd century ad. A tombstone in the village church of Corgoloin depicts what appears to be a Celtic god with a vine in his right hand; other gravestones have carvings of grapes. Also, archaeologists have found no Italian amphorae of the mid 2nd century or later in Burgundy, which may indicate that from then on the region was producing enough wine of its own. From at least the 3rd century onwards, however, wine was transported from Italy in wooden barrels instead of amphorae, and wood is far more perishable than pottery. The earliest literary evidence dates from ad 312. In a panegyric addressed to the Emperor Constantine the Great on the occasion of his visit to Autun (Augustodeunum), the citizens plead poverty. Part of the grim picture their orator paints is abandoned vineyards, the roots of the old vines so thickly intertwined that it would be impossible for a farmer to dig ditches. However old the vines were-and a mere human lifetime's worth of neglect would account for their tangled state-commercial viticulture had clearly been well established by the early 4th century. As the Roman empire disintegrated, Burgundy came once more under barbarian rule, by the Franks, the Alamans and the Vandals. The Burgundians, Scandinavians by origin, founded a kingdom in the Rhone valley, later including Lyons and Dijon, in 456; they were defeated by the Franks under Clovis's sons in 534. The first recorded words in praise of Burgundian wine date from the Merovingian period. Gregory of Tours, who finished his History of the Franks in 591, says that the hills to the west of Dijon produce a noble wine that is like Falernian-the highest praise possible from a Dark Age latinist. That wine, and the clear water flowing from the springs around the city, are sufficient reasons why in his opinion Dijon should become an episcopal see. In 587 King Guntramn, grandson of Clovis and son of Clotaire, gave a vineyard to the Abbey of St Benignus at Dijon, and in 630 the duke of Lower Burgundy donated vineyards at Gevrey, Vosne, and Beaune to the Abbey of Beze, near Gevrey. The beginnings of monastic viticulture in Burgundy were in these Merovingian times. Nobles, peasants, and monks cultivated the vine under Charlemagne, when political stability brought prosperity. Medieval Burgundy owes its reputation as a producer of excellent wines largely to the monks and monasteries. The monks had several advantages over lay growers: they had cellars and store rooms in which to mature their wine; and, most importantly, they kept records and had the time and the degree of organization necessary to engage in systematic improvement. The first group of monks to acquire vineyards in Burgundy on a large scale were the Benedictines of Cluny. The foundation in 910 of the Abbey at Cluny in the Maconnais was the beginning of the Benedictine reform movement. Between 927 and 1157 Cluny became a vast organization with hundreds of dependent priories, not only in France but also in England, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Through benefactions from pious laymen, Cluny came to own all the vineyards around Gevrey by 1273, and in 1232 the duchess of Burgundy granted the Abbey of St-Vivant the vineyards now known as Romanee-Conti, La Romanee, La Tache, Richebourg and Romanee-St-Vivant (see also Domaine de la Romanee-Conti). It also owned Pommard and vineyards at Auxey and Santenay. The other group of monks to have a lasting effect on Burgundian viticulture were the Cistercians, an order founded in 1098 which took its name from the site of its first monastery, Citeaux, east of modern Nuits-St-Georges. Although austerity and asceticism were the aims of the order, in contrast to the luxury and ostentation of the Benedictines, the Cistercians, often through donations, became rich and important landowners. The Cistercians' first vineyard was given to them by the duke of Burgundy in 1098, not long after their foundation. Soon they were buying vineyards as well: in 1118 the Cistercians of Pontigny on the river Serein purchased, after much haggling, vineyards from the Benedictine monks of St-Martin at Tours from which they produced a white wine, the first Chablis. In 1110 the monks of Citeaux were given land at Vougeot and went on to acquire more land there: it took them until 1336 to acquire enough to form one large vineyard, which they surrounded with a wall, the Clos de Vougeot. They bought or were given more vineyards all over the Cote d'Or and trained their lay brothers to work them: Beaune, Chambolle, Fixin, Pommard, and many more. Aided by their skilled workforce, the monks had the time, the experience, and the learning necessary to experiment, record, and compare. By observing how different plots of vines produced different wines, the Cistercians discovered the importance of terroir and began to acknowledge different crus. In the 12th and 13th centuries white wine was preferred to red. In an age of murky drinking water, carefully made white wine was valued for its clarity. The wines that were most highly reputed, however, were not those of Burgundy but those of the ile-de-France centred on Paris, which could easily be transported by rivers. Burgundy, on the other hand, was cut off, and its wines, which could only be transported north with much expense and difficulty along bumpy roads, were as yet little known. In medieval French texts, `vin de Bourgogne' was from Auxerre, whose wines could easily reach Paris along the river Yonne: transport by boat was cheaper, easier, and less harmful to the wine than being carried by horse-drawn cart along bumpy roads. Until the 15th century what we call burgundy was known as `Beaune'. Upon his election in 1305 Clement V moved the papal court to Avignon. During this `Babylonian captivity', which lasted until 1377, the court of the Avignonese popes was famous for its extravagance as well as its corruption, and demand for the wines of Burgundy to the north surged. The wines of `Beaune' came generally to be regarded as second to none. Urban V (1362-70) went to Rome for three years in 1367 but, exasperated by the political infighting there, he returned to Avignon. In a letter, Petrarch made a vain attempt to persuade him to go back to Rome but had to admit that the best Burgundy was not to be had south of the alps. The Babylonian captivity ended with Urban's successor Gregory XI, but the wines of Burgundy retained their high reputation. From a byword for largesse in Avignon, Burgundian wine became a status symbol with the Valois dukes, four generations of which governed Burgundy from 1363 to 1477. The first duke, Philip the Bold (1363-1404), son of King John of France, took a keen interest in the wine of the region, its most important export. In 1395 he issued a decree declaring the Gamay grape variety to be harmful to human beings and its planting contrary to Burgundian practice. The first mention of the Pinot Noir grape, named Noirien, dates only from the 1370s, but in all probability the grape had been in use longer. Modern Gamay has a far higher yield than Pinot Noir, and documentary evidence suggests that the same was true in the 14th century. In the same decree Philip inveighs against the use of organic fertilizers, presumably because it also increased yields. Philip was trying to maintain quality, while many growers thought that manure and Gamay would make for easy profits. Although Philip the Bold wanted every single Gamay plant uprooted by the next Easter, we find his grandson Philip the Good (1429-67) still thundering against the inferior vine, which he says is a threat to both the wines and the dukes of Burgundy. Fearing for his immortal soul, Philip the Good's rapacious Chancellor Nicolas Rolin built the famous Hospices de Beaune in 1443. But what were these famous wines really like? The white wines of Burgundy were probably made from the grape that also produced the highly reputed white wines of north eastern France, the Fromenteau, which had pale red berries and white juice, and could well be the ancestor of our pinot gris. (The Chardonnay of modern white burgundy did not appear in the region until after the Middle Ages.) Also, in the Middle Ages wines were drunk in the year following the vintage, so properly matured burgundy would then have been unknown. The duchy of Burgundy was once so proud of having the finest wines and finest court in Christendom that it developed into a state, and very nearly a kingdom in its own right. The defeat and death of the over-ambitious Charles the Rash, however, led to its being reincorporated into the kingdom of France. As the monarchy became stronger the power of the Church declined slowly, so that during the 17th century many of the famous vineyards donated to the Church during the Middle Ages were sold to the increasingly important bourgeoisie in Dijon. Although transport difficulties (see rivers) still hindered burgundy's fame abroad, the famous giant Pierre Brosse managed to interest Louis XIV in his Macon and the Sun King's physician, Fagon, prescribed old burgundy instead of champagne as the most suitable wine for his monarch's health. Roads began to improve in the 18th century and the tolls and tribulations inherent in road travel diminished, encouraging the start of commercial traffic in Burgundy. The first negociant (merchant) houses were founded in the 1720s and 1730s, including Champy (1720) and Bouchard, Pere et Fils (1731), names which have survived to this day. The earliest major work on the wines of Burgundy, Claude Arnoux's Dissertation on the Situation of Burgundy . . . was published in 1728. It demonstrates the fame of the red wines of the Cote de Nuits and the special reputation of the oil de perdrix (partridge-eye) pink wines of Volnay, while the existence of white wine in the Cote de Beaune earns only a brief mention. Most vineyards remained in the hands of Church or nobility until the French Revolution. From 1791 the vineyards were sold off, often split between several owners. Since then they have further fragmented as a result of the law of equal inheritance among children laid down in the Napoleonic Code. This process has caused much of the difficulty in understanding burgundy: the consumer must familiarize himself not only with a plethora of village and vineyard names but also with the relative merits of possibly dozens of producers of each one. Burgundy prospered in the early 19th century, although wine prices were low even for the fine vineyards. In addition, there was widespread planting of the inferior Gamay grape to provide wine that was plentiful and cheap, albeit mediocre. Transport conditions continued to improve with the opening of a canal system in Burgundy, and the Paris-Dijon railway in 1851. Easy prosperity was first checked, however, by the spread of powdery mildew in the 1850s and then destroyed by the arrival of the phylloxera louse in the 1870s. This calamity was finally admitted in the Cote d'Or in 1878 when an infested vineyard in Meursault was surrounded by soldiers. The Burgundians did not find it easy to come to terms with the problem: there were riots in Bouze-les-Beaune between factions in favour of treating vineyards and those against; a posse of growers in Chenove actually attacked a team sent in to spray the vines; American rootstocks, the eventual saviours of French vineyards, were banned from the region between 1874 and 1887. Eventually, however, common sense prevailed and by the 1890s post-phylloxera wines were again on the market. Only the best vineyards were worth replanting after the predations of phylloxera, a valuable side benefit of the disaster. The Burgundians were well aware of the considerable variation in quality of the wines produced by different plots of land, or climats, as they are known in Burgundy. In 1855 Dr Lavalle published his influential History and Statistics of the Cote d'Or, which included an informal classification of the best vineyards. This was formalized in 1861 by the Beaune Committee of Agriculture, which, with Lavalle's assistance, devised three classes. Most of the first class were in due course enfranchised as grands crus (see grand cru) when the appellation controlee system was introduced in the 1930s. Most burgundy was sold through the flourishing negociant houses until the years of hardship after the First World War. The economic depression of the 1920s and early 1930s threatened to ruin many small growers. One solution was the co-operative (see co-operatives), particularly useful in the Maconnais, where prices were lower. Another was for proprietors to bottle their own produce, a move which met with opposition from the merchants when growers such as the Marquis d'Angerville, Henri Gouges, and Armand Rousseau pioneered the concept of domaine bottling in the 1930s. Whereas in 1962 wines produced and bottled by growers accounted for only 15 per cent of production, by 1990 nearly half of all Cote d'Or wines were domaine bottled. he vineyards of Burgundy are based on limestone originating in the Jurassic period. This takes the form of undulating chalk hills in Chablis; a long narrow escarpment running south and a touch west from Dijon to Chagny, the Cote d'Or; more isolated limestone outcrops in the Cote Chalonnaise and Maconnais; with the vineyards of Pouilly-Fuisse beneath the imposing crags of Solutre and Vergisson in the extreme south.< The climate in Burgundy is broadly continental. In contrast to Bordeaux, Burgundy is noticeably colder in the winter months, similar in temperature in the spring, but a little cooler during the summer. Although usually dry in winter, Burgundy tends to suffer from particularly heavy rainfall in May and June and again in October, which may or may not fall after the harvest. Spring frost can be a problem (especially in Chablis), while hail causes local damage almost every year. Overall, there is a shorter and more variable summer than in Bordeaux (which is why only early ripening grape varieties can be grown there). And whereas the hardy Chardonnay vine can thrive under these conditions, producing what are widely considered the finest full-bodied dry white wines in the world, the temperamental Pinot Noir vine is less regularly successful. For more details of Burgundy's special aptitude for top-quality wine production, see climate and wine quality. Burgundy is at the limit of successful ripening, the red wines of Auxerrois rarely achieving much depth or body. The great red wines of Burgundy are produced on the escarpment of the Cote d'Or, especially in the Cote de Nuits sector. Even here several vintages in a decade may lack sufficient sun to ripen properly. Among the white wines of Burgundy, the wines of Chablis, reflecting their northern origin, are green tinted in colour and comparatively austere to taste. The most revered white wines are those of the Cote de Beaune, there being practically none in the Cote de Nuits, while the whites of the Cote Chalonnaise are lighter and attractive to drink young. Further south the white wines of the Maconnais enjoy enough sun to make fat and ripe wines, although many of them lack finesse. For details, see Cote d'Or; Chalonnaise; and Maconnais. Burgundy has one of the world's least varied ranges of vine varieties. Almost all of the region's best red and white wines are made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay respectively. On the Cote d'Or, more than seven in every 10 vines planted were Pinot Noir in the late 1980s, while Chardonnay plantings were increasing so that even at the most recent vineyard census of 1988 they represented nearly two in every 10 vines. Gamay and Aligote, the `lesser' red and white wine vines respectively, were in hasty retreat, although Bourgogne Aligote has its followers. In the Cote Chalonnaise and Maconnais, Chardonnay plantings increased notably during the 1970s and 1980s when the variety overtook Gamay as most important, and became an important source of wine labelled Bourgogne Blanc. In 1988 the Saone-et-Loire departement which includes these two southern Burgundy wine districts had 4,500 ha/11,100 acres of Chardonnay (three times more than the Cote d'Or). Gamay plantings were just over 3,000 ha while those of Pinot Noir were 2,800 ha. There were also about 500 ha of Aligote, approximately the same area as the Cote d'Or. The vineyards of Burgundy, especially those of the Cote d'Or, are the most minutely parcellated in the world. This is mainly because the land has been continuously managed and owned by individual smallholders-there was no influx of outside capital with which to establish great estates as in Bordeaux. But the combination of the Napoleonic Code, with its insistence on equal inheritance for every family member, and the fact that the land has proved so valuable, has meant that small family holdings have been divided and subdivided over generations. One vineyard, or climat, as it is known in this, the cradle of terroir, may therefore be owned by scores of different individual owners, each of them cultivating sometimes just a row or two of vines (see Clos de Vougeot, for example). Unlike the Bordeaux trade with its large volume of single appellations, and many stratifications of those who sell it, the Burgundian wine trade is polarized between growers and negociants, or merchants. Because the laws of equal inheritance have been strictly applied in a region of such valuable vineyards, individual growers may for example produce just one barrel, enough to fill just 25 cases, of a particular appellation. The market for burgundy was built by the merchants who would buy grapes and wine from many different growers before blending and selling the results. Behind a merchant's Aloxe-Corton label, for example, may well be the produce of many different plots and cellars. Although in some cases these blends may be better than any individual ingredient, and in most cases today the merchants have better equipment and wine-making skills than the average Burgundian vine-grower, such blends have met increasing consumer resistance. Wine merchants such as Frank Schoonmaker and Alexis Lichine introduced particularly the American public to the notion of domaine bottled burgundy in the 1950s and 1960s, creating a demand which resulted in a widespread improvement in the quality and authenticity of the merchants' produce. The merchants increasingly own their own vineyards, and are able to label the wines they produce `mise en bouteille au domaine'. (Because few growers can afford their own bottling equipment, mobile bottling units are much used in Burgundy.) For more details see negociants. See also Hospices de Beaune and see Bourgogne for details of Burgundy's generic appellations. For the names of individual appellations, see Beaune; Nuits; Chalonnaise; and Maconnais. Chablis and Beaujolais are treated separately. Bibliography - Derlow, R. K., `The ``disloyal grape'': the agrarian crisis of late fourteenth century Burgundy', Agricultural History, 56 (1982), 426-38.
- Dion, Roger, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (Paris, 1959).
- Coates, C., Cote d'Or (London, 1997).
- Hanson, A. D., Burgundy (2nd edn., London, 1995).
- Norman, R. H., The Great Domaines of Burgundy (2nd edn., London, 1996).
- Pitiot, S., and Servant, J.-C., Les Vins de Bourgogne (11th edn. of P. Poupon's original, Paris, 1992).
References Aligote amphora appellation controlee Auxerrois barrel Beaujolais Beaune Bordeaux Bordeaux trade bottling Bourgogne Bourgogne Aligote Celts Chablis chalk Chardonnay Charlemagne classification climate and wine quality Clos de Vougeot continental co-operatives Cote d'Or cru domaine bottling Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Falernian fertilizers frost Gamay grand cru hail harvest Hospices de Beaune limestone monks and monasteries negociant Paris phylloxera Pinot Noir Pouilly-Fuisse powdery mildew price Rhone rivers rootstock terroir yield
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