Burgundy

Two monastic orders shaped the Côte long before anyone drew an appellation on it. The Cluniacs arrived with the abbey of Cluny in 909, holding land on the Côte Chalonnaise and the plot now called Romanée-Saint-Vivant. The Cistercians came with Cîteaux in 1098 and worked the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits. Both received their first land as gifts from nobility, then bought up the neighbouring plots.

What the monks built was a vocabulary that outlived them. A climat is a vine plot demarcated by hand and named since the Middle Ages, its crop vinified separately from a single variety so the wine carries the plot's name. A clos is a climat with a wall around it, built to keep grazing animals off the vines. Some changed hands only once or twice before the Revolution.

Clos de Vougeot is the surviving artefact of that work. The Cîteaux monks farmed it while identifying climats nine centuries before the classification was formally recognised, and put up the cuverie that still holds four giant wine presses beside an above-ground grand cellier. In 1551 Dom Loisier, forty-eighth Abbot of Cîteaux, added a Renaissance manor. The vineyard runs to almost fifty-one uninterrupted hectares; the château no longer produces wine.

In 1395 Philip the Bold issued what the Bourgogne Wine Board calls the first wine and vine policy in history, framed around the health of the drinker. It banned Gamay from the duchy — the stated worry being that its prolific yield would outshine Pinot Noir — and recommended Pinot instead, for lower yields and more complex wines. In 1429 Philip the Good founded the Order of the Golden Fleece at Bruges.

The ban did not hold. Growers gradually returned to Gamay, and it kept a strong foothold in Burgundy right up to the arrival of the appellation system in the 1930s, when the reorganisation favoured Chardonnay and Pinot Noir — together now more than 80% of everything planted. The grape two dukes legislated against went south instead, and remains the red variety of the Mâconnais and of Beaujolais.

The Revolution broke the estates apart. Church and noble property was confiscated, broken up and auctioned as national assets, and the great monastic blocks were sold in plots, bought mainly by the local and Parisian bourgeoisie. The arithmetic still shows: Clos de Vougeot, one wall around fifty-one hectares, now carries up to eighty owners, with Château de la Tour the largest at 5.48 hectares, ahead of Méo-Camuzet at 3.03.

The Burgundy pyramid has four tiers and precise arithmetic. Seven régionale appellations sit at the base. Above them, 44 village appellations named for the commune where the grapes grew. Premier cru wines come from single delimited plots inside a village appellation — those plots are the climats. At the top, 33 grand cru appellations replace the village name with the climat's own: Corton, Montrachet, Clos de Tart.

The hierarchy was written down long before it became law. The first vineyard classifications were proposed in 1827 and 1831, then reworked in 1855 by Dr Lavalle into an official ranking of wines; the appellation d'origine contrôlée system introduced in 1935 took its categories from him. Underneath the paperwork sits geology — Pinot Noir on well-drained stony limestone, Chardonnay where the limestone carries more clay, roots reaching ten yards down.

The château at Vougeot was nearly lost. The banker Gabriel-Jules Ouvrard saved it first, then the wine merchant Léonce Bocquet, who bought the buildings in 1889. The estate's own account calls him extravagant — a man who combined a remarkable flair for publicity with a pronounced taste for ostentation. Restoring it took him to the brink of bankruptcy. He chose the Clos as his final resting place, and in 2013 the drive to the gates was given his name.

The UNESCO listing took a ten-year campaign, and a winegrower chaired it: Aubert de Villaine of the Côte de Nuits. Behind him stood 150 volunteers, a scientific committee of 36 specialists spanning geology, history, linguistics and agronomy, and a support committee under the broadcaster Bernard Pivot. By July 2015 they had gathered over 64,000 signatures. The inscription was announced on 4 July 2015, alongside sites in Denmark and Turkey.