One of the things I appreciated about this thread so far was that no one invoked the tired stereotypes of the villages (e.g. “rich and nutty Meursault”). Those stereotypes are very persistent, and often used as short-cuts to understanding Burgundy, but I think they seldom make much sense any more. In reality, I’m convinced that communal identities are as much commercial and social / cultural in their origins as they are terroir-derived.
On the commercial side, the négociants historically treated the villages as “brands”, and often “corrected” the wines to make them conform with the brand image: i.e. if a Pommard was a bit light and delicate, add some tannic wine from Maranges or further south; if a Meursault was a bit too mineral, add some Viré-Clessé; if a Chablis was a bit too rich, sell it as Puligny. I think that it’s an open secret that this continued well after the appellation system was established in the 1930s.
Historically, there are of course other factors that conspired to give the wines of one village a certain identity. Comparing Meursault and Puligny, for example, the water table is lower in Meursault, so there are lots of deep, cold cellars, adapted to long sur lie élevage in barrel; whereas in Puligny, there are no real underground cellars so élevage was historically shorter and more likely to include foudres and tanks. Villages would exchange vine material - witness Volnay, for example, where many producers used d’Angerville selections. Some villages such as Chassagne historically favored cordon pruning whereas others such as Puligny favored Guyot. And there was often a go-to source of winemaking advice in the village: back in the 1950s and ‘60s in Puligny, François Virot, for example; in Gevrey, it was Joseph Roty. Fifty years ago, I get the impression that the villages were much more inward-looking than they are today. Some producers didn’t even taste their neighbors’ wines, let alone the next village’s.
Today, if you want to do a long élevage in Puligny, you just install air conditioning and humidification. You are more likely to get your technical advice from a consultant such as Kyriakos (Consulting | Burgundia œnologie) or Michael Paetzold (http://michaelpaetzold.com/). Your points of reference will include wines from all along the Côte d’Or, as well as elsewhere. And rather than being dominated by négociant blends, which give a “mean” of an appellation, there are more and more smaller bottlings, giving us the chance to taste more an more lieux-dits on their own. That makes it abundantly clear how many exceptions there are to the stereotypical “rules”: e.g. mineral and ethereal Pommard Vignots and tensile and incisive Meursault Meix Chavaux.
My view is that all this has really exploded the old stereotypes that used to apply to different villages, revealing that it’s the “climat” and not the commune that’s the largest denominator of terroir. Moreover, I think it’s clear that an e.g. high altitude site with thin soils in Meursault (such as Vireuils) will have more in common with a high altitude site with thin soils in Puligny than it will with a low-lying site in Meursault with rich soils (such as l’Ormeau). In that sense, the terroir distinctions one can generalize divide the slope east to west, by altitude, rather than north to south, by commune! Of course, the uselessness of stereotypes only makes Burgundy more complicated to understand. But equally, it makes it even more fascinating. I hope that it will also open up increasing discursive space for due attention to the decisive influence of vine genetics, farming and winemaking—things that tend to be pushed under the carpet when we reduce whole villages to simple caricatures.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}