Climats: Why Burgundy Splits Its Vineyards Into 1,247 Plots

Key facts

Climats in the World Heritage site

1,247

UNESCO listing

2015

Length of the vineyard strip

about 50 km, Dijon to Maranges

Clos de Vougeot walled by

1336

Grand Cru vineyards

33

What a climat is

A climat is a named vineyard with precise boundaries, which Burgundy growers have recognised for generations as giving a wine of its own. In everyday French the word means climate; in Burgundy it means a piece of ground.

A climat can be smaller than a hectare or several dozen hectares. Size is not what defines it. What defines it is that the wine shows the same character year after year, so people named the plot and recorded where it ends.

Many of these names appear on labels, such as Clos de Vougeot or Les Amoureuses. That is why a Burgundy label can locate a wine down to the field, not just the village.

Soil, slope and exposure

Two neighbouring climats can make different wines because these three factors change every few dozen metres along the Côte d’Or.

• Soil: the slope is Jurassic limestone and marl, and the mix of stone and clay, and the depth of topsoil, shift from plot to plot.
• Slope: mid-slope drains well and gets full sun; the foot of the slope has deeper, wetter soil; the top is cooler and more exposed to wind.
• Exposure: most of the slope faces east and south-east and catches morning sun, but side valleys turn the hill, so some plots get less sun than their neighbours.

This is why most Grand Crus sit in a band at mid-slope while regional-level vines tend to be on the flat land below. The rank of a plot follows its position on the hill, not the name of its owner.

How monks mapped the plots

The first people to record the differences between plots systematically were medieval monks: Benedictines of Cluny Abbey, founded in 910, and Cistercians of Cîteaux Abbey, founded in 1098.

The abbeys received vineyards plot by plot through donations. The monks worked them year after year and noted which parcel gave which kind of fruit. That knowledge built up over centuries, long before AOC law arrived in the 20th century.

Clos de Vougeot shows how it worked. The Cîteaux monks received their first land there between 1109 and 1115 and kept adding parcels until the wall around the vineyard was finished by 1336. Today its roughly 50 hectares are a single Grand Cru shared by more than 80 owners.

The Dukes of Burgundy later became both owners and regulators. In 1395 a ducal edict banned Gamay from the Côte d’Or to keep the slope for Pinot Noir.

UNESCO World Heritage, 2015

In 2015 UNESCO inscribed "The Climats, terroirs of Burgundy" on the World Heritage List, counting 1,247 climats, each with its own name and land-registry record.

The site has two parts. The first is the vineyard slope, running about 50 km from just south of Dijon to Maranges, with its villages and the trading town of Beaune. The second is the historic centre of Dijon, seat of the dukes who set the rules for the vineyards.

So what UNESCO listed is not a wine. It is a way of dividing land that people built and kept up for several hundred years.

Climats and the Cru ranks

A climat is the name of a piece of land; a Cru is a rank the law gives to some climats. Every Grand Cru and Premier Cru is a climat, but most climats carry no Cru rank at all.

A vineyard name on a label therefore does not always mean Premier Cru. Check whether the words Premier Cru or Grand Cru appear with it.

Questions people ask