There's an earthiness about the place that is entirely lacking in France's other great wine region Bordeaux. The people who own Burgundy's fabulously expensive plots of vines also tend them personally, which I find both admirable and reassuring. They not only get their feet dirty, which can happen to even a casual wine country visitor, they get their hands dirty too. There is dirt under their fingernails, and dirt engriming hands calloused and deeply lined by years of vineyard labour.
But these are also hands which regularly rest on the steering wheel of the latest Mercedes, typically ferrying its owner to another plate-by-plate infusion of Michelin stars. Making wine in Burgundy today means making money in serious quantities.
Only the vineyards of Champagne to the north are worth more. And many an infant burgundy flies out of the cellar even at a cost price approaching dollars a bottle. There have been vineyards here for at least as long as the monastic tradition that dominates it architecturally and they have been producing exceptionally fine wine for centuries.
Over those centuries the special character of each vineyard has emerged, either as reality or, just as commercially significant, accepted folklore. With each human match and despatch, the ownership of the tiny strips of vines in these vineyards subtly shifts, as a result of both the post-Napoleonic requirement that all inheritances are shared equally between brothers and the continually changing pattern of family alliances through matrimony.
Just a few square metres of dirt are enough to cause a village rift if they were rated a Grand Cru in the famous, mid-nineteenth century classification of Burgundy vineyards. And even Premier Cru vineyards are so valuable they are often shared between dozens, sometimes scores, of different owners. Every now and then someone comes along and tries to write a definitive guide to who owns what in Burgundy, but it's too fluid a subject for hard covers.
