Burgundy's Grand Cru Route

The road came before the tourism. The Route des Grands Crus was created in 1937 — France's first wine route, nicknamed by its own promoting body the Champs-Élysées of Burgundy. The full itinerary runs Dijon to Santenay: 60 kilometres, 31 villages, 32 grands crus. It crosses two halves — the Côte de Nuits, which that body calls the kingdom of Pinot Noir, and the Côte de Beaune, the birthplace of the finest whites.

What the road passes was formally recognised in 2015. UNESCO describes the Climats as precisely delimited vineyard parcels on the slopes of the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune south of Dijon, inscribed under criteria (iii) and (v), with a property of 13,219 hectares and a buffer zone of 50,011. Château du Clos de Vougeot dates the decision to 4 July 2015 and calls it the fruit of a hard-fought ten-year campaign.

The parcelling started with the Cistercians. Château du Clos de Vougeot's own account has the monks of Cîteaux working their vines with an intuitive understanding of the different terroirs, long before anyone codified a climat. The buildings followed: a vat house whose four giant wine presses are still in place, then in 1551 a Renaissance manor by Dom Loisier, forty-eighth abbot of Cîteaux. It became a historic monument in 1949.

Beaune's landmark was built to treat the poor. The Hôtel-Dieu was founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Duke of Burgundy, and his last wife Guigone de Salins, during the Hundred Years' War. Classified a historic monument in 1862, it stayed in activity as a working hospital until the early 1970s, when services moved to the modern Hôpital Philippe le Bon. Only in 1988 was it given over entirely to visiting.

The hospital became a wine estate by bequest. Founded in 1443, the Hôtel-Dieu grew into a winegrowing hospital holding 60 hectares of Burgundy vineyard, and since 1859 its harvest has been auctioned to fund the institution. The sale anchors Les Trois Glorieuses: the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin chapitre at Clos de Vougeot on the Saturday evening, the auction on the Sunday afternoon, and the Paulée de Meursault on the Monday lunchtime.

Grand cru is rarer than the road makes it look. Across Burgundy it totals 550 hectares, about 2% of 28,000 hectares of vineyard. The largest single grand cru vineyard in the Côte de Nuits is Clos de Vougeot, though Corton in the Côte de Beaune is the largest in Burgundy overall. Clos de Vougeot is also the anomaly of the slope: no other grand cru vineyard there stretches down to the N74 road.

One appellation, many hands. Of Clos de Vougeot's 50.6 hectares, 47.3 are in production, split among nearly 80 owners — some with only enough vines for a case of wine in a vintage. Every one may put the same grand cru name on the label. The château at its centre is privately owned, takes no government subsidy, and funds its restoration from admission fees.

The Hospices sale is en primeur, which is why its prices read strangely. The current year's vintage is sold when the wines are weeks old, by the pièce — a 228-litre cask — and the buying négociant ages it 12 to 18 months before bottling. Ludivine Griveau has been régisseur since 2015, directing 60 hectares. One pièce a year, the pièce des présidents, is sold by candlelight for charity.

The route's most expensive stop was bought in a proxy war. In 1760 the Romanée-Conti vineyard was purchased from André de Croonembourg by Jean-François Joly, acting on behalf of Louis François I de Bourbon, the Prince of Conti, whose name the vineyard still carries. The scale stayed tiny: in 2008 just 1.88 hectares of the appellation were in production, giving 26 hectolitres — under 3,500 bottles for the world.

The record for a single bottle broke twice in one afternoon. Two bottles of 1945 Romanée-Conti fetched US$558,000 and US$496,000 at a Sotheby's sale in New York of wines from Robert Drouhin's cellar; both had been estimated at US$22,000–32,000. The auction thread runs the whole route: the family behind Beaune's Les Remparts hotel descends from Elisée, first auctioneer of the Hospices sale.