How to read a Burgundy label
Burgundy labels name a place, not a grape. Here is how to work out what you are holding, in the order the label gives it to you.
6 min read
A Bordeaux label sells you a château. A Burgundy label sells you a patch of ground, and assumes you already know where it is. That assumption is the whole difficulty.
The grape is not on the label, and does not need to be
Red Burgundy is Pinot Noir. White Burgundy is Chardonnay. There are two exceptions worth knowing — Aligoté, which is always named, and Gamay in Beaujolais, which is a separate matter.
So when a label says nothing about the grape, it has told you.
Work from the biggest name to the smallest
Read the place names in order of size, and stop at the smallest one you find.
- “Bourgogne” and nothing else — grapes from anywhere in the region.
- A village name — Meursault, Gevrey-Chambertin — grapes from that commune.
- A village plus a plot, with “1er Cru” — one named parcel inside that village.
- A plot on its own, with no village — a Grand Cru. The place is famous enough to stand alone.
That last one catches people out. A bottle marked simply Corton outranks one marked Aloxe-Corton, because the village has dropped away.
The hyphen trick
In the nineteenth century, villages appended the name of their most famous vineyard to their own. Gevrey took Chambertin. Chambolle took Musigny. Puligny and Chassagne both took Montrachet, which is why the great hill is shared.
The consequence is a permanent trap: Gevrey-Chambertin is a village wine. Chambertin is a Grand Cru. One word apart, and a very large gap in price.
Négociant or domaine
Somewhere in the small print you will find either mis en bouteille au domaine — bottled by the grower — or the name of a merchant house.
Neither is automatically better. Burgundy’s plots are so finely divided that most growers own a few rows of anything; the good merchant houses have been buying and blending well for two centuries.
What the vintage tells you
More in Burgundy than almost anywhere. The region sits at the northern edge of where Pinot Noir ripens, so weather decides a great deal.
Ask the shop. A merchant who cannot tell you whether a year was hot or wet in the Côte d’Or is not a merchant worth buying Burgundy from.
The one habit worth forming
Look at the back label for the appellation line, printed in small capitals. It states the legal name of the wine, without marketing. Everything on the front is subordinate to it.