Marsannay
One grape, seven grounds.
Marsannay is the northern door of the Côte de Nuits, on the edge of Dijon: the same east-facing fault slope as the great villages to the south, but broken into small hills and side valleys, with more marl and more scree on the surface. Its growers have been arguing since 2002 that a third of the appellation deserves premier cru status; the case was filed in 2012 on a new geological map.
Sylvain Pataille makes the argument in the bottle. He keeps his old Aligoté Doré parcels apart and bottles each on its own, so the only thing that changes from wine to wine is the ground: iron-red earth over oolite at Clos du Roy, gravelly limestone at Champ Forey, light gravel over water-holding clay at Les Longeroies, marl full of fossil oysters at La Charme aux Prêtres. In his words, a Clos du Roy will never be a Longeroies.
Tap any two to compare them and cut a slice through the slope between them. Lieux-dits are placed from the BIVB's map and the French land register; Les Auvonnes au Pépé sits at the lieu-dit En Auvone in Couchey, and La Charme aux Prêtres, which is in neither, is placed approximately.
Curve shapes are illustrative; the size of each swing is from published figures.
Parcel sizes, planting years and soils from Sylvain Pataille via our producer page and Becky Wasserman & Co. Soil depths are not published, so the pits are drawn to suggest the ground, not to scale.
Every producer on this plate
Pick a producer to light up their vineyards and see where each wine comes from.
How the ground is shown: there is no open soil map at the scale of a lieu-dit, so colours and pits follow what the grower describes. Heights and slopes come from the elevation data.
Heights marked as the grower's figure come from our producer notes; others are read off the elevation data at the pin. Soil notes come from the producers' technical sheets.
Sources: elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles (EU-DEM and other public data); parcels and soils from Sylvain Pataille and Becky Wasserman & Co; the premier cru case from the Marsannay growers' 2012 filing. Lieux-dits from the BIVB's Bourgogne Maps and the Etalab land register.
On to Gevrey-Chambertin · back to Burgundy.