Vosne-Romanée 1940-2010

No, this isn’t a slew of tasting notes, but rather a few aerial photographs of Vosne-Romanée from 1940, 1962, 1977 and 2010. I’ve managed to get hold of a bunch of photos such as these, and it’s fascinating to see how many sites hadn’t been planted in the aftermath of the Second World War. The wine business was subsistence farming back then, and land and wine just weren’t valuable; to the extent that the bottom of the Clos Saint-Jacques was used to grow alfalfa. In these photos, you can see the gradual replanting of these vineyards, some of which were abandoned during the war years, some of which had been abandoned after phylloxera. If you turn your eye from the vineyards to the villages, it’s also amusing to note the rise of the swimming pool, something that’s even more dramatic in some of the other, larger villages and which tracks the value of Burgundy’s wines pretty accurately.

Vosne-Romanée in 1940 by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

Vosne-Romanée in 1962 by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

Vosne-Romanée in 1977 by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

Vosne-Romanée in 2010 by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

Some zooming in is required to really trace what is going on… and for those for whom that’s too complicated, I zeroed in on the Cros Parantoux in a post on my IG a few weeks ago:

Thanks William.

Very amazing as always William.

Very cool William, Thanks for sharing. I’m sure there are a lot of interesting stories behind how things eventually did develop.

Jayer told stories how he subsisted on sunchokes grown in Cros P during the war and could never eat another one. He had to dynamite large rocks out of Cros P to plant it after he bought up tiny parcels.

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Thats very cool. Always interesting to hear and see how the “landscape of wine” has changed through history, and how wine has been part of history.

Terrific as always. Perhaps the rise of the swimming pool can be also correlated with climare change! Gets darn hot these days in the Cote’Or!

If you zoom in, you can see the replanting in progress in the 1962 photo!