We had a white wine from Viserny last week. That’s Viserny there in the photo. It’s just down the road from where we live. And you would never guess but it’s the most important wine village in the area. The wine we tasted was a well-made-home-made inscrutable, and enough of a curiosity that we wanted to meet the person who made it. So we got an introduction and went to see Raymond Berthier whose farmyard is in the center of the village.
We live in the heart of Burgundy on high ground known as the Auxois. It’s the French continental divide, so rivers flow off from here to the Med, to the Atlantic or the North Sea. For this, Burgundy has always been an area of passage, and the Auxois one of the few places around where you could keep your feet dry. If all roads led to Rome, one of them came right through here. And if you’ll allow me to cram two millennia into one phrase, this goes a long way to explaining wine production in Burgundy… though maybe not wine production as you know it: a lot can change in a millennium.
There’s more to Burgundy red wines than the great wines of Burgundy. Many of the world’s most famous vineyards are to the east of here on a strip of crumbling cliff that runs above the Saône river valley from Dijon down to Macon. They call it the golden hillside, the Côte d’Or, and it is special. To the west there’s Chablis, and Chablis too is special. But rewind 150 years to a time when commerce for wine was driven by quantity, not quality. Those famous few vineyards were known and prized, but wine for the most part was made by farmers for whom viticulture was just part of a bigger job. Poly-culture was prevalent all across Burgundy, with farmers raising cattle, growing wheat, tending orchards and also vines. Because wine-making was not a full-time occupation, not all farmers were good winemakers, and not all wine was good. But the decent stuff made its way to market via a new canal system that was navigable from Dijon to Paris and beyond.