The Côte d'Or, from the standpoint of wine, is a hill or chain of hills, running from north to south along the western edge of the Saône valley, from Dijon to Santenay, some thirty miles in all. You can see the vineyards from the windows of a Paris-Riviera train—a narrow green ribbon of vines, hardly ever a mile wide, sloping up from the valley to the oaks or pines or outcroppings of yellow rock along the crest of the Côte. Every two or three miles, nestling among its vineyards, is a sleepy little village with a world-famous name.
Some fifteen miles south of Dijon a break in the slope divides the Côte d'Or into two more or less equal halves, an each half takes its names from the most important of its little towns—the northern Côte de Nuits from the village of Nuits, the southern Côte de Beaune from the town of Beaune. With one or two minor exceptions, the Côte de Nuits produces red wines only, and these, on the whole, are bigger and more robust, greater and longer-lived, than their charming sisters of the “Slope of Beaune.”
The following is a list of the wine-producing communes and their more important vineyards, not in order of excellence, but from north to south. Before each vineyard are a number of asterisks which give its traditional, although not official, ranking, three of them standing for téte de cuvée, and so on accordingly. After each vineyard, I have given its area in acres, and if one remembers that 150 cases of wine is an above-average yield for an acre of Pinot vines, it will be apparent how extremely small the production of Burgundy of the first quality is and undoubtedly always will be.
Cote de Nuits
Larrey and Chenôve. Now suburbs of Dijon. Most of the former vineyards have been subdivided into building lots, and no great loss, either.
Marsannay-la-Côte. A cooperative cellar produces a pale and pleasant little vin rosé of some local reputation but not much consequence.
Fixin. This is the northernmost village that makes red wine worthy of the name of Burgundy, and a pretty village it is, too, with a Romanesque church, and a lovely old Romanesque manor house set down in the center of its best vineyard, the Clos de la Perriére (any vineyard that calls itself a “clos,” according to French law, is supposed to have a wall around it). This wine is an old favorite of mine, delicate as a Musigny, fragrant, beautiful, rather fragile, with a wonderful old-fashioned label not much larger than a large postage stamp.
**Clos de la Perriere (12)
*Clos du Chapitre (12)
Brochon. Interesting largely because its best-known vineyard, Crais-Billon, or Crébillon, belonged in the eighteenth century to the Jolyot family, and supplied a nom de plume to the French poet, Prosper Jolyot, or “Crébillon.”
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