What a climat actually is

The word looks like a false friend and is one. In Burgundy, a climat is a plot of vines with a name, a boundary and a history. It has nothing to do with weather.

Where the boundaries come from

Most were drawn by monks. From the tenth century, the abbeys of Cîteaux and Cluny worked the slope, kept records, and noticed that wine from one strip tasted reliably unlike wine from the strip beside it.

They walled the good ones. That is what a clos is — a climat with a wall around it. Clos de Vougeot has had its wall since the twelfth century.

Why the plots are so small

The Revolution broke up the church estates and sold them off. Napoleonic inheritance law then split every holding again at each generation, among all the children equally.

Two centuries of that produces the situation Burgundy is in now: Clos de Vougeot’s fifty hectares are shared between roughly eighty owners. A grower may own a strip of vines the size of a tennis court, and it will still say Clos de Vougeot on the label.

This is why two bottles of the same Grand Cru, same year, can taste unalike and both be honest.

What UNESCO listed

In 2015 the climats of the Côte d’Or were added to the World Heritage list — not the wine, and not the landscape as scenery, but the system of named parcels itself, as a cultural artefact.

It is a strange thing to protect and a correct one. The boundaries are the accumulated record of a thousand years of people paying attention to small differences in the ground.

What it means when you are standing there

Walk the D974 south from Gevrey and you will pass low stone walls every few hundred metres, sometimes with an iron gate and a name plate. Those plates are the climats.

Nothing about the view explains why one side of a wall costs twenty times the other. The explanation is in the soil depth, the drainage, and the angle to the morning sun — and it took centuries to work out.