Greatness in the Unassuming
Although the concept of terroir encompasses a multitude of elements—both environmental and human—that come together to shape a wine’s identity, every time the word appears, my mind drifts to dramatic vineyard landscapes, places where extreme morphology seems destined to yield equally distinctive wines. The gravity-defying verticality of the Mosel–Saar–Ruwer district comes to mind; the dazzling, rugged corridor of the Northern Rhône; the wind-swept island of Santorini; the lava-infused black soils around Mount Etna; the pale, luminous albariza of Jerez; the kaleidoscopic geology beneath Alsace or the Napa Valley.
The irony is that the birthplace of this very idea is a rather unassuming place, a landscape largely devoid of striking features. Its slopes are gentle rather than forbidding. Its physical traits are mostly uniform, with little that is outwardly remarkable. Were it not for the stone markers and the signs bearing the names of celebrated vineyards, it would be nearly impossible, to the naked eye, to distinguish a grand cru from a premier cru or even a village-level site. In the Côte d’Or, the magic happens underground, where subtle shifts in clay-to-limestone ratios from one row to the next give rise to different wines. The mystery deepens even more in winter, when a thick curtain of fog envelops villages and vineyards, erasing reference points and dissolving the landscape into a pale cloud. More than once on a December trip, I battled a stubborn fog that rendered my travel along the Côte somewhat fruitless. Adding insult to injury, the haze vanished the moment I reached the nearby A6 highway, replaced by clear, sunny skies.
The practice of selecting and ranking parcels according to the quality of the wine they yield dates back to the Middle Ages, when Benedictine monks—granted large swaths of land by the nobility—began the painstaking work of classifying vineyard sites. Over the centuries, growers refined this art and developed an intimate understanding of these soils. And yet the enigma persists: the precise mechanism by which these subtle shifts in soil composition yield distinct wines remains, at least in part, unknown. I suspect this enduring enigma is part of what gives the Côte d’Or its magnetic pull for wine lovers worldwide. For me, each visit offers a piece to the puzzle, yet it also stirs new questions and doubts, renewing the intrigue and the desire to return time and time again.
Long live the Burgundian mystery.