French pieces of resistance
Published: (01-09-2007)
Author: Wine & Spirit News
Desk
Britain's best-known Burgundy expert, Jasper Morris MW, explains why the region is still a happy home for so many small producers
The classic image of Burgundy is of a vast patchwork of small producers eking out a living with a few parcels of vineyard here and there. That still feels like the truth within the Côte d'Or, though the good ones do a great deal better than merely eke out an existence. When Etienne Grivot and Bernard Gros bought a helicopter together another vigneron remarked that "you can tell times are hard in Vosne Romanée when it takes two vignerons to buy a helicopter ..."
All over France inheritance laws must follow the Code Napoléon which specifies that all children shall inherit equal parts, which obviously is likely to lead to fragmentation of vineyard holdings if the offspring are numerous, as is often the case.
There are several reasons why this fragmentation appears to be so much more evident in Burgundy than elsewhere. One is the nature of the vineyards. A grower in Chavignol with 12ha of vineyard may hand over 4ha of Sancerre to each of his three children. The children of an equivalent grower in Vosne Romanée may also receive 4ha apiece, but if their father owned eight vineyards they will have to be divided up between them so they can each benefit from a morsel of grand cru Richebourg and a few rows of premier cru Malconsorts, as well as village Vosne Romanée, Hautes Côtes de Nuits and whatever else may be available.
It is also true that the value (of the land and of the wine derived from it) of these small holdings in Burgundy is so high that it is easily possible to derive a good living from a handful of hectares - as long as you have not had to pay out a small fortune to purchase the land or pay inheritance tax on it.
The other crucial reason is social in nature. Burgundy is a rural area, a region of peasant and gentleman farmers, some of whom are quite aristocratic - various domaines include the titles of Comte, Marquis, Duc and even Prince. All subscribe to the same general theory that they are tenants for their lifetime, having inherited their vineyards from previous generations and with the intention of passing on the same or better to their descendants. Compare this with the mercantile flavour of Bordeaux, where vineyard holdings are big business. Here the structure is in the form of a company whose shares may be divided among the potential inheritors.
This is beginning to happen in Burgundy, but is not without problems of its own. By the third generation there are so many uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, nephews and nieces holding shares that whoever is running the domaine may have difficult economic and political battles to fight with his or her relations. Those shareholders furthest away from the action are probably going to be most interested in the size of their dividend cheque and short-term profit is rarely the best solution for the long-term health of a domaine.
The three principal routes to market are: through the co-operative system; via a negociant by selling grapes, must or young wine; or as a domaine, bottling one's own product.
The co-operative option is prevalent in the Mâconnais and important also in the Chalonnais and Chablis, but times have been very difficult recently in the Mâconnais in particular and the return in the crisis years before interest in the 2005 vintage kicked off an upturn was scarcely above the cost of production. Some vignerons in this category may well have been obliged to sell off land.
Negociants used to have a near stranglehold on the market. Prior to 1980 the majority of what was shipped to export markets came from the key merchant houses of Beaune and Nuits-St-Georges, with a scattering of famous domaines - usually those that had started domaine bottling during the economic crisis of the 1930s - being represented overseas. This did not reflect the ownership of the vineyards which, if anything, was even more dispersed at that time than now.
During the 1980s more and more domaines began to steadily bottle their own wines, and as a result they enjoyed the heady success of Burgundy's golden decade in the 1990s. Now it is possible to source very good wine from a dozen or more different domaines in the most important villages. The fame of these individual producers and their key position on the world market today have reinforced the concept of Burgundy as a region of small producers.
The line between merchant and grower has become increasingly blurred as major negociants have been buying vineyard land wherever possible, and many leading domaines have developed small scale negociant sidelines - Méo-Camuzet, Burguet, Patrice Rion, Thibault Liger Belair and Dujac are cases in point in the Côte de Nuits; Sauzet, Coche Dury,
JM Boillot, H Boillot and Jean-Philippe Fichet in the Côte de Beaune.
In the 1980s the average grower's holding was under 4ha. Today it is nearer 6.5ha, which is still no more than half the average holding in Bordeaux. The number of domaines with fewer than 5ha has halved, and those with more than 10ha trebled during this period. At the lower end, there are few producers today who mix a few rows of vines with other forms of agricultural income. At the upper end there has been some consolidation, with successful players buying up the bits and pieces which become available.
How does a successful grower today set about enlarging his production if he wants to be in control of production in the vineyards as well as in the cellar?
Ideally, he would purchase more vineyards, but not much comes on the market and the price for the better vineyards is exorbitant. Recent contracts for village Meursault have exceeded €40,000 per ouvrée, which amounts to around £1.5 million per acre. Puligny-Montrachet at village level is even more expensive. In many parts of Burgundy the sale of vineyards has to pass through the hands of SAFER, a government organisation which regulates sales and can even decide who the land should be sold to. In theory SAFER should favour local growers under the age of 40 who do not yet have significant holdings. In practice, it does not always seem to work out that way.
The next option is to rent a vineyard from an owner who does not wish to farm it himself. Here there are official formulae which govern such contracts, typically based in the Côte d'Or on a rental of the commercial value of four barrels of wine per hectare from that vineyard.
Alternatively, the grower might enter a sharecropping agreement, by which he returns to the owner either a third or a half of the crop, depending on the nature of the contract and what costs the owner undertakes to cover.
Here again the contracts are highly regulated and are difficult for the owner to discontinue, unless he is in a position to take back the farming of the vines himself.
More recently, to avoid the constraints of these formulaic contracts, a number of growers have entered into a double agreement with vineyard owners. The first arrangement is a contract to farm the vineyards on behalf of the owners, for a specific charge. The second is a contract to buy the grapes. This way the vigneron ends up with grapes which he has farmed himself to his own specifications, and the owner is not tied down to unbreakable long-term contracts.
It is possible to live well off a surprisingly small holding however. Dominique Lafon, at the head of a famous Meursault domaine of 13.8ha, supplemented since 1999 by a further sizeable holding in the Maconnais, can see the attraction: "One man could make a pretty good living from a holding of as little as 2ha, as long as the vineyards were of village level or above. You could do the whole thing seriously - biodynamics, cultivation by horse and so on - and you could manage it all on your own. Of course, if you had Montrachet or Musigny, you would only need half a hectare, or less - I'd sign up for that."
Cinq petites poissons
Five of the smallest fish in Burgundy's pond are finding ways to survive and thrive
Domaine Arnaud Ente
A small domaine in Meursault of 4ha, mostly rented from his grandfather. Arnaud and wife, Marie-Odile, are assisted by two full-time employees, making an exceptionally high labour cost of one person per hectare. When the opportunity has arisen to add better situated vineyards in Meursault they have dropped holdings of Bourgogne Aligoté and Bourgogne Passetoutgrains in order to keep the total size the same and easily manageable.
Most of the holding is AC Meursault. Increased profitability has come from separating out different lieu-dits and cuvées such as Clos des Ambres and La Sève du Clos, which justify being sold at more elevated prices.
Domaine David Clark
David Clark is a young Scotsman, formerly an engineer with the Williams F1 motor racing team, who has settled in Morey St Denis to become a vigneron. He had virtually no prior experience and not much capital - just enough to buy a small house with a cellar, and to invest in a few very small patches of vineyard. The humblest of beginnings with 0.27ha of Bourgogne Grande Ordinaire has been augmented by some Bourgogne Rouge, 0.10ha of Morey St Denis (enough for one barrel) and, from this year, some Côte de Nuits Villages.
Commercially, decision-making has been easy - find one UK importer to take half the crop and one in the US to take the other half, just keeping back a few cases for friends and family.
Jean-Yves Devevey
Jean-Yves Devevey's father was a classic polyculteur with a hectare or two of Aligoté and Pinot among other agricultural holdings. Bitten by the wine bug, Jean-Yves became a full-time vigneron, with a few vines of his own in Beaune and the Hautes Côtes and contracts to farm further vineyards in the latter area.
Devevey has built a cuverie and underground cellar and invested in the necessary top grade equipment to help him make the best wines possible - all of which is a heavy investment which the volume he produces from his own vineyards (1.5ha owned and 2.65ha farmed) is not enough to cover. Hence he supplements his volumes with negociant cuvées which both allows him to offer some more upscale appellations (Meursault, Chassagne Montrachet 1er cru) and to amortise the cost of his equipment.
Domaine Denis Bachelet
Just under 4ha of vines in Gevrey Chambertin - spread between Bourgogne Rouge, Côte de Nuits Villages, Gevrey Chambertin, Les Corbeaux premier cru and grand cru Charmes Chambertin - are enough for Denis Bachelet and his wife, Marie-Jo, to live off quite comfortably. For the most part this is what Denis has inherited, though he has managed to supplement the original holding with small purchases of Côte de Nuits Villages and Gevrey Chambertin.
"The domaine is just right for us at the moment", says Denis, "but I am not so sure for the future." With a son and a step-son due to inherit, the domaine will need to expand to look after the next generation.
Alice and Olivier de Moor
The standard model for a Chablis domaine is a sizeable holding, machine harvesting, a battery of stainless-steel tanks in a clean modern winery with low labour costs. Not so for the de Moors who have painstakingly constructed a living out of a small holding in the Chablis village of Courgis, coupled with a few barrels of St Bris and Aligoté.
For the most part the land in Courgis was in agricultural use and needed planting as vineyard from scratch. The wines have been made in barrels in a tiny cellar designed for dwarfish earlier generations. Now, nearly 20 years down the road, the business is making enough money to justify investment in a purpose-built cellar.