Hi Ronan, I'm Cheba. Good to meet you. Nice to meet you. So, can you tell me a little bit about the history of winemaking in Burgundy?
Yeah, the history of winemaking in Burgundy
So how long have you got we're talking, you know a thousand years worth of history here
I guess the grape came into France and travelled around most of France really brought by the Romans and the Roman army
initially
It came in through sort of Marseille area
travelled all the way at the Rhone Valley and then eventually kind of got to sort of the
Slopes of Burgundy if you've got several thousand guys all marching and they're not fighting and they're getting a bit restless
The best way to keep them sedated is by giving them lots to drink
So yeah
So that was the kind of the Roman army sort of moving across the world
Really that was bringing that grape variety vitis vinifera everywhere it went.
I guess you know the most significant thing that really happened in Burgundy was the monastery so it's the rise of the sort of
ecclesiastical orders, you know
There were big Abbey's
over sort of the abbey of Cluny and their Abbey of Seto and you had the Benedictine monks and you have the
Cistercian monks for them
It was a great source of income. But you went to Burgundy you see all those little tiny plots the little vineyards, you know
The vineyards are not big. You know, there's small some of the size of a couple of tennis courts
So it was really the sort of the monks that were working those vineyards year after year
So they were the ones that kind of said, okay
This area is particularly good, you know, this is gonna be our best wine and this area is not so good
So this is gonna be a least good wine
Burgundy definitely grew more
organically and over time and with you know
Generations of monks kind of seeing what was the best vines and who produced the best
So the Clos de Vougeot itself was built in about 1339 something like that
So a long time ago and then if you go into Beaune itself
You'll see this old hospital called the Hospice de Beaune that was built in
1443 and it was built by this guy called Nicolas Rolin the hospital built up lots of
Vineyards lots of land and now they have famous wine makers that will make the wine from it and they'll have an auction
Every November it's on the third Thursday of November. They auction off barrels. So you can go and buy a full barrel of Burgundy
Can you tell me the history of the negociants?
So like we said the churches owned all the vineyards, you know
They were big landowners and then came along the French Revolution
And basically what happened then is a lot of the sort of wealthy landowner including the church
They had all that land taken off them
And a lot of that land was given back to the you know, the general population, you know
The sort of the peasants, the common people so that all of a sudden they start owning vineyards
But it's an expensive business making wine and selling wine and distributing it
so you definitely got this rise of people call the negociants so a
negociant is basically someone who will deal with the farmers the grape growers, they'll buy in either the grapes or the fully made wine
They'll put it in barrels themselves
They'll age it then they bottle it and then they sell it and distribute it and nowadays
I think the negociants are getting less and less
You know, I think some of the good negociants that are still around that have lasted for a long time
Your Louis Jadot's, your Remoissenet's, your Bouchard's, people like that, you know, they're still around, but I think that nowadays
You know Burgundy has reached such
Astronomic prices that if you own a little plot of burgundy you'd be crazy not to make the wine yourself and sell it yourself
So, how are the best producers linked to the history of Burgundy? Burgundy kind of as we talked about is all really about history you
know the best producers are usually linked to
historically to families that have had those domaines for generations
It's very, very difficult for a family to come in and buying vineyards now because it's just so expensive
One thing that did happen in Burgundy as well is what was called the Napoleonic law of inheritance
so really after the French Revolution what happened is that people inherited vineyards and then Napoleon came along and he basically said
Of his own by a family once the patriarch the father of that family dies
Then that domain must be divided up between the children. So this is kind of happened in burgundy
so basically you have a vineyard and
One generation have four kids it split open for the next generation that vineyard has four more kids that can split into four
So literally the vineyards over generations have got cut cut cut cut smaller and smaller and smaller
so
You know, if you're a big family with the big history that's been around for a long time
you can you can hopefully keep some of that vineyard, but otherwise
You know
You're going to see visit some people and they will walk you through a vineyard and they'll say okay
This row is mine. This row is my sister's this row is my cousins. This row is my second cousin
So it's just been fractionalised down really really small proportions
What do you think makes Burgundy so special?
Well, I think it's definitely the history, you know
There's not very many wine regions in the world that have such a long history
You know you find them in France you find them in Italy, you know?
But a long long history, you can imagine that that literally, you know over those generations, you know
plant material and vines and things like that kind of
mutate and adapt to their environment and if you've essentially got the same vines that have been there for
You know a thousand, eight hundred years something like that and they really kind of adapt to the environment
You know that mother nature is very clever. It gets to know that it's like this in August. It's like this in springtime
It's going to be this hot in summer. This is amount of water that the soils going to give them
This is the amount of rainfall that they're going to get so they really kind of adapt and mutate to form their best
expression from that particular plot of land and you know
You could go to Burgundy and maybe take one of the vines out of Burgundy out from a famous domain and then take it off
To somewhere like Chile or Argentina or South Africa or somewhere like that plant it not going to perform the same, you know
Because it's in in different environment, but what that what that extended period of history gives you is that you know
The perfect vine growing in the perfect environment. That's really
Adapted into its environment so, but probably the thing that makes Burgundy, you know, so special is that it's in such limited quantities
Like we say good to reproduce and he might make one barrel might have one row of fines if he's a very famous
Producer and that one barrel 300 odd bottles and supplies the world plus, you know
These are sort of craftsmen that have been doing this for a long long time
So they really know how to perfect the best expression that you can from those great varieties in that environment