Terroir over Winemaking Technique (Using Burg as an example)

A simple question, how close can get gap get, between a more hallowed terroir vs. a lesser terroir, if a winemaker put equivalent resources into both? I am most familiar with Burgundy levels, so my question is framed for burgundy (GC vs. 1er vs. Village). I am more interested in one level apart (so thinking about burgundy, Grand Cru vs 1er Cru, or 1er Cru vs. Village and not Grand Cru vs. Village).

The presupposition here is a winemaker is putting nonequivalent resources between two terroirs (this is an assumption I have made… if one can sell grand cru grapes for a multiple of 1er cru grapes and a multiple of village level grapes… why use the best oak, best yield management, etc. for the lower name brand grapes?). If that presupposition is correct… how close could the gap be if a winemaker treated their 1er or even village level grapes with the same resources (time and money) as their grand cru grapes? Using similar yield management, oak, etc.?

This is a backdoor question to… how materially different are the grapes between GC and 1er (if vine management was the same)? I see maps on how some 1er crus are only feet away from GC vineyards, yet sell for a fraction of the price… if the vine/elevage management was the same… would the quality gap narrow dramatically?

There have been threads on this. You’re probably going to get a lot of confident and definitive answers.

But the best way to find out is to taste side by side blind. If you know what you’re drinking, you’ll find the “better” wine most of the time. So get some friends and pour the wines blind. Don’t talk about them until each of you has figured out what is what, otherwise you’ll just end up convincing each other.

Then see what you come up with. That would be the answer to your question.

the presupposition is incorrect as there are many domaines that treat all their wines the same, and some that don’t.

i think you’re thinking about this too literally. if a domaine is lucky enough to have GC holdings, or even 1er, and they are conscientious, then they should make good wines and occasionally truly great wines. the best of the best do that more often. a very small handful do that most of the time.

the grapes aren’t different, it’s the vineyard that grows those grapes. and after more than a few hundred years, the best vineyards really do tend to enable their owners to make the best wines from the grapes harvested. adding expensive oak isn’t going to do it.

I do not disagree that GC > 1er > Village in such a tasting. My question is… if a 1er wine would handled with the same resources and focus as the GC, would it close the gap? if they are already treated the same, then that answers the question…

as always in Burgundy, it depends. Rousseau treats his Clos St. Jacques like his grand crus and the gap isn’t large. But the gap depends on producer, the holdings within each vineyard (g or 1er Cru), vintages, and other unnamed factors. Some prefer Rouget’s Cros P to his Echezeaux and there are other such examples.

Conscientious top winemakers exert maximum effort with all levels from Bourgogne up. The terroir is usually the limiting factor. Oak treatment differs often, though. Your simple question is anything but!

Actually, I don’t think there are many domaines that truly treat all their wines the same. Generally speaking, the lower the appellation, the less good the vine genetics (this is sometimes a choice made generations ago in a very different economic climate), the higher the yields, the shorter the maceration (if red), the less new wood / lowest quality oak (the latter more important), the shorter the élevage. Also, come harvest time, if there is some sort of weather event (heat spike, rain, or whatever), the higher appellations will be prioritized at the expense of the lesser appellations.

I believe that—excepting a few sites that are evidently misclassified—the hierarchy of terroirs in Burgundy does very much exist. But it is clearly reinforced rather than simply being revealed in the cellar.

When the comparatively humble terroirs really are treated like grand cru, the resulting exceptions prove the point: a Sève du Clos from Arnaud Ente, from what we would think of as one of Meursault’s less interesting terroirs (lieu dit En l’Ormeau), is better than most Meursault Perrières. A Vosne-Romanée Genaivrières from Leroy is more exciting than many Echezeaux.

Also some producers don’t have GC holdings, such as all of the volnay red producers… it’d be interesting to compare how angerville treats ducs with some gc producers.

Furthermore, since these classifications were formed during the end of a mini ice age when the biggest limiting factor was the ability to ripen grapes, would those classifications still stand now that the vines don’t need a slight incline to reach full maturity thanks to global warming and improved vineyard management practices.

Just an itb opinion. Classification of a site after centuries definitely shows the potential in the fruit, but every year you start from zero. Making Pinot Noir is a hard gig, nowhere more so than Burgundy. I also doubt many great winemakers were accountants before hand.

When you aspire to make great wines, and to make them you must first aspire to it, you believe that you can do that at every level. Add in the revenue generated with todays Burgundy pricing, and my guess is that, in any great house, the barrels in the 1er cru are the very best barrels that are suited to the site(according to the winemakers belief).

Particularly for those who believe in the beauty of Pinot Noir, the goal is to excel with every site, and over achieve at every level. It’s hard for me to believe that a house like Leroy, Rousseau, Ente, or Coche-Dury would execute any other way, even if it’s only because that’s how we do it at my uber-petit house in backwater Willamette Valley. (I would view a very large house like Jadot differently because they simply have too much fruit be harvested to treat it all the same. But I could be wrong, they do a nice job with a lot of wines.)

Ultimately, GC is GC because the sites are better. They were logged hundreds of years ago for making the best wines when conditions were equal, and continue to be that way today because the site is the difference maker.

Last, the margin in Burgundy for established estates, owning vineyards for more than w5 years is enormous. Even if 1er doesn’t yield Euros the way the GC vineyards do, they are still very profitable. Unless your reputation as a producer is lesser than your peers, which is another reason to focus as much resources as it takes on the lower levels. And with the pricing elite houses, Leroy for example, have been able to achieve with village level wine and lower, spare no expense is more than justified with whatever sites you farm.

Which sites are you referring to and why are those sites evidently misclassified, William?
And: Are those sites actually misclassified or are the current winemakers simply not able to exploit the full potential of those privileged sites?

Well, that is a rabbit hole, but just to give a couple of examples… Clearly Volnay Santenots extends too close to the route nationale, and the really low-lying parts of Santenots do not merit 1er cru classification. Gevrey Evocelles, by contrast, would likely have been classified as Gevrey 1er Cru had it fallen in the commune of Gevrey as opposed to Brochon. And Clos Saint-Jacques merits Grand Cru more than some parts of Charmes / Mazoyères. But really, walking the vineyards and tasting the wines, one is simply immensely impressed by how well the boundaries were drawn.

I think to understand the mentality in Burgundy (not at the domaines you cite, but at many addresses), you need to step back fifteen to twenty years, to a time when all these wines were much more modestly priced on the marketplace—with a much smaller gap in price between a top domaine’s best grand cru and a mediocre producer’s rendition of the same appellation—and volume was more likely to be the decisive factor in any given domaine’s revenue. The period of Burgundy pricing that we are currently living though is highly anomalous historically, and you don’t change an entire culture over night. Legally, you have the right (as it is expressed in French) to make quite a bit more volume in the lower appellations, and you were and are expected to. I was discussing this with Christophe Roumier, who cropped his 2018 Bourgogne at 35 hectoliters per hectare (about two-and-a-half tons per acre). He observed that several colleagues have queried why he doesn’t crop a bit more generously, saying, “it’s just Bourgogne, all the same”. I don’t criticize this mentality, which has deep cultural and historical roots, but it would be naive to imagine that it no longer exists—even if, when you see the sort of reputation that someone like Ente can build with great village wines, you might think that the writing is on the wall. To put it another way, one of the parcels adjacent to one of Leroy’s Auxey-Duresses lieux-dits is chemically farmed and machine harvested. The Leroy wine sells for more than 1,000 USD per bottle on the market; the other likely leaves the domaine for less than 20 EUR per bottle. The writing may be on the wall, but it will take some time before everyone reads it.

To directly address your quote, most Burgundians do not think of themselves as “making Pinot Noir” but as making appellations; and the world of appellations is not the equal-opportunities world of varietal wines.

Note, also, that the wines of today are influenced by the planting decisions of the past: a winemaker aspiring to make great wine may be stuck with the high-yielding fat-berried clones planted by his or her father in the 1980s…

I think that consumers, having internalized the hierarchy of appellations, also play a role in reinforcing it, in that I have met many collectors who would sneer at a communal wine, even from a top producer, seeking only the grand appellations. In my view, that is totally wrong-headed, but to some extent at least the economic model of contemporary Burgundy is premised on a softer version of that prejudice. Too many communal or premier cru bottlings that embarrassed grands crus would be very “disruptive”—especially within a producer’s cellar!

But this is quite a complex question, and a very interesting one, if one goes beyond the easy answers. It really needs to be set in some sort of historical context, and in that regard I would highly recommend the decade-by-decade chapter introduction in Allen Meadows’ new book, Burgundy Vintages, which is really the first book—to my knowledge, at least—to properly contextualize the wines of the region over time.

This is another tangent, but my perception is that while climate change has advantaged some historically less-successful sites, the higher-appellations remain the best sites: they are the best not because they are simply the warmest or most exposed to the sun, but because they are most buffered: i.e. in hydric stress they have the best water access, whereas in the rain they drain the fastest etc etc. My intuition would be that climate change will need to be quite drastic, at really the most extreme end of what is projected, before that hierarchy (at root, hydrological) is disrupted.

At the moment, it is often said that higher altitude sites must do better in warmer years, but there is a problem, which is that the higher altitude sites often have very thin soils and are susceptible to stress: photosynthesis shuts down, the canopy burns, and the fruit desiccates without actually truly ripening. This was quite obvious when walking around the Côte before harvest this year, and it is just as obviously undesirable. My sense is that today, deeper soils are an advantage: so some of the lesser Beaune 1er Crus where one can find standing water in the winter are now turning out very nice wines in vintages like 2018 and 2019, as are the lower parts of the Clos Vougeot. Real sweet-spots seem to be places with interesting soil hydrology (i.e., enough water for uninterrupted ripening in stressed conditions) plus a cooling breeze, e.g. Suchots, Lavaux Saint-Jacques, Pommard Saussilles.

Quick comment.

Grape quality from gc/pc/village vineyards are not homogoneous.

My understanding is that winemakers will select the best grapes from their gc vineyard and pass the rest to a generic prem-cru
or to their village wine. They may also select the best grapes from their pc vineyard and pass those down.

My understanding is that this decision is in part about improving quality but it is also economic: balancing the quality of one’s brand versus the need to make a living.

So, what’s the hypothetical standard. The wine that would result if ALL the grapes from a gc vineyard are used in the final wine -or- the results when a selection is made of the best gc grapes for the final wine?

A few months back I tried to study the true effect of terroir on wine. It’s fairly superficial but might still be of interest:

Thanks for that and your two prior answers as well. Fascinating stuff!

This is really quite unusual in Burgundy. Are you thinking of any particular domaine when you make this observation? Many grand cru and premier cru cuvées are small, one single fermentation tank, producing just a few barrels. Declassification would only take place if something goes wrong with one of the ensuing barrels. What sometimes happens is that a small parcel or two of premier cru, too small to vinify separately, will be blended into a communal bottling: this is the case with Rousseau’s Gevrey and Thierry Glantenay’s Volnay, for example. Back in the day, when premiers crus didn’t attract such a premium, that was more common: until 1993, for example, Roumier’s Chambolle contained all of their fruit from Les Cras!

Also if I recall correctly, Mugnier’s parcel of Les Plantes is blended into their village Chambolle.

Winemaking technique is part of the expression of terroir. So there’s that. And everything Mr. Kelley says is on point. Unequal vineyards cannot be made equal without diminishing quality of the better vineyard (all other variables being the same). And that’s why some get paid so finely.

Beckstoffer treats every vineyard and every block the same in Napa. If there was ever anyone who has a vineyard regimen, it’s him. Yet differences in quality between vineyards (and even blocks!) can be vast. Part of this is likely due to planting material, row direction, etc; in other words “human decisions.” But much of Crane was planted at the same time, same direction, same clone, same rootstock, all gets watered at the same time, pruned at the same time, etc. Yet some blocks everyone knows are better than others. I have to believe this is even more true in Burgundy.

BTW- this kind of questioning is fantastic. I know some vineyard owners who don’t ask questions like this. To me this is the fun of wine to a large degree… the philosophical inquiry.