Burgundy Classification

Burgundy has been on a rollercoaster for over fifteen years. Prices have risen and fallen, reputations have been made and lost, and the structure of the trade has changed. And while in 1985 I could praise the white wines and approach the reds with mixture of hope and bitter disappointment, now it's the reds that have shot ahead, with ever more producers making wines with the sort of fragrance and exotic, tangled flavours that have made the red wine names of the Cote d'Or, the 'golden slope', more famous than any in the world. And the whites? Too often they've reacted to worldwide competition - because every major wine-producing country has some first-class Chardonnays to its credit - by arranging their laurels more comfortably under their snoozing heads.

CHABLIS
This northerly outpost of Burgundy is where the greatest see-sawing in price has been. Prices of Chablis tumbled during the recession of the early 1990s, and then resurgence in demand. As spring frosts regularly hit these vineyards, thus reducing the vintage to come and providing another reason why prices should be increased (even if the frosts turn out not to have done quite so much damage as had been feared) Chablis has big market to watch, and it's only a small region, located in the hills where the river Serein glides through the small town of Chablis. Although Chablis is dry, limpid, full of bouquet, lively and light, unlike any other child of the Chardonnay grape, if, in a word, it has love, it is because of the link that ties the stock to its soil called Kimmeridgian.

COTE D'OR
Since the mid-1980s there has been a renaissance here - and never was a great wine area so much in need of one. The white wines had survived better, but all too many of the reds were in a sorry state: poorly made and from vines that had been induced to yield every drop they could. Then it was the merchants who were firmly in control, and most of the wines with character and individuality were to be found among the growers.

Nowadays the Cote d'Or is a top-notch Pinot Noir area. Yes, there are a still producers who are underperforming. Yet, you'll always get that in every area. But there are far more growers who really care, far more growers opting to leave the protection of the co-operatives and merchants and start bottling their own wine - and far more merchants are now producing top-class wine.

It's true that the majority of the red wines of the Cote d'Or are light - fragrant, marvellously perfumed with cherry and strawberry fruit, sometimes meatier, sometimes intensely fruity, but light. It's also true that they can be too light. Yields must be kept down if the wines are to have the concentration to develop their wonderfully gamy, vegetal complexity. The current trend is to practice various forms of organic viticulture which should eventually restore the balance of the soil after years of overdosing with chemicals.

COTE CHALONNAISE
The Cote Chalonnaise has until recently been the forgotten area of Burgundy, with much of its wine going to make up merchants' blends - usually under the generic appellation of Bourgogne. However, since 1973, with the newer and more strictly regulated approach to Burgundy labeling, anywhere with a legal right to a Burgundy appellation, and with vineyards already planted with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, has become an attractive proposition. A great upsurge in activity in the 1970s and 1980s culminated in 1990, with the new appellation, Bourgogne-Cote Chalonnaise, for the whole area. The villages of Mercurey and Rully have greatly increased their output but so far the results from the whole Chalonnais area have been somewhat inconsistent. The wines should be good. There are some fairly decent sites, yet what we've seen is quality in fits and starts.

Certainly the Cote Chalonnaise lacks the well-ordered compactness of the Cote d'Or. Its vineyards are splattered rather than spread along the numerous ins and outs of hillside between Chagny, just below the southern end of the Cote de Beaune, and Montagny about 24km (15 miles) south. They're more exposed to the prevailing westerly winds than the Cote d'Or vineyards which keep the temperature down. The grapes are primarily Pinot Noir - which in general here produces rather dry reds that don't seem to have the richness or the juiciness which is usually expected - and Chardonnary, which is better. It can be rather stony and dry when no oak barrel aging is used, but sometimes a soft vanilla succulence creeps over the wine when a grower decides to invest in a few barrels - which more of them are doing. It might well be that in the end the Chalonnais turns out to be a better area for whites than reds.

MACONNAIS
It is in southern Burgundy, starging almost at the borders of the Cote Chalonnaise near Buxy, and spreading south until it mingles with the frontiers of Beaujolais just south of its main town of Macon. The Maconnais is easily the biggest producer of white wine in Burgundy (making nearly half the region's annual total, using primarily Chardonnay. Poully-Fuisse is certainly the most famous of these wines, but two-thirds of the production is of simple, unmagical Macon Blanc.

Macon also produces some red wine, for which it used, once, to be more renowned. In fact it used to be predominantly a red wine area but nowadays, however, less than a third of the 6000 hectares (14,825 acres) of the Maconnais vineyards is given over to red vines, and even these don't produce anything very memorable.

In fact, very little wine from the Maconnais of whatever colour is memorable. As in the Cote Chalonnaise, there's a lack of ambition in the wine-making (though not, sadly, in the pricing) that means that even though there are some good vineyards here there's not much excitement. Partly it may be the result of the extremely efficient co-operative system that dominates the region and seems to level standards. But whatever the reason, the message from the New World doesn't seem to have got through yet - that message being that it's perfectly possible to make tasty Chardonnay, year after year, at the sort of price most people want to pay.

BEAUJOLAIS
Is there any wine that is more French than Beaujolais? Any name which conjures up so potently our visions of bucolic, moustachioed Frenchmen with obligatory beret and blue-and-white striped T-shirt, carousing carelessly with their flagons of foaming red? All the cliched foreigners' fantasies about the French revolve around this splashing, irreverent red from the southern end of Burgundy.

Of course, it isn't really in Burgundy - the grapes are different, the soils and wine-making methods far removed. And the people of Beaujolais, too, are all richer and rather more sober now that the rest of the world has taken to their local wine in such a big way. They can afford to sit back and enjoy the beauty of those rolling hills which make the region one of the most heart-softening and romantic of the wine areas to visit. Beaujolais was an astonishing marketing success.