Burgundy Wine Basics - Different Regions Of Burgundy And Tasting Strategy for Beginners

Hello wine hunters, welcome back to my wine channel. Today I'm doing another video in my Burgundy Basics series and wanted to talk about the different regions in Burgundy and strategies when we're starting out in Burgundy. I have beside me a couple of wines. This is just subliminal advertising for some of the other videos I've done in the past. Please check those out. This I did a video on. I've also done a video on Poissidor and their Chambon Moussigny Premier Cru Le MRS and I believe I've also done one on this wine which is the Champi Sauvignon Le Bon Premier Cru. All right let's talk a little bit about Burgundy and again this series is for people just starting out with Burgundy. I'm just trying to learn more about it there's lots of people that have a lot of experience with Burgundy. This might be too basic for you but I think a lot of people have a lot of difficulty with Burgundy. So I'm going to try and start from the bottom just like I did with my Bordeaux Basics series and I'm going to explain a different strategy because each region you have to approach it differently. So let's go with Burgundy. So first of all Burgundy obviously is located in France. It's in the I guess the eastern part of France, middle eastern part of France. I'm not going to have a map showing this and it's kind of divided into basically four or basically five different regions. One is quite northerly which is called Chablis and Chablis is very close to the Champagne region and closer to Paris. So it's a little bit off but it's still considered Burgundy. There's another region below Burgundy called Beaujolais so there's some discrepancy whether that's actually part of Burgundy. Let's for the purposes of my videos consider it not part of Burgundy in a separate place. The reason I say this is Beaujolais the major grape type in Beaujolais is Gamay and that's a little bit different than Burgundy. And just for to make it simpler we're basically concentrating on the premier grapes of Burgundy region which for red is Pinot Noir and for white is going to be Chardonnay. Acknowledging that there's also some about seven percent of the vineyards are Aligote which is another white wine grape. Okay I'm going to go through those five regions in Burgundy and again these are going to be generalizations but I think just to give you an overview you can get so bogged down in intricacies that it becomes difficult from a beginner's point of view and you'll see we'll just continue to build on the knowledge. So again we talked about Chablis that's kind of in the northern region of Burgundy and it's going to be closer to the Champagne region. Mostly it's known for un-oaked Chardonnay so that there of course there's this is generalization there there are some Chablis that might be oaked but generally speaking you're going to look for un-oaked crisp Chardonnay white wine producing region. Then you have what they call the Cote d'Or which is the Cote is slope and d'Or golden so golden slope which is comprised of two separate regions one is called the Cote de Nuit which is more north and then one is called Cote de Beaune and so I always thought Cote de Nuit is like night so it didn't make sense night slope what does that mean but actually it's more because there's a city kind of a general a major city in this region called Nuit-Saint-Georges and so it's the slope of Nuit-Saint-Georges. Likewise in the southern more a little bit more southern is Cote de Beaune and that the region there is it's the slope of Beaune which is another big city so that kind of makes sense to me. So Cote de Nuit is known mostly for its red wine again I'm generalizing they also make white wines but mostly for red wine in fact about 80 percent I think of production in Cote de Nuit is red wine and that's where you're going to see most of the high-end kind of red wines from DRC from Vaughan-Romanais a lot of that will come from Cote de Nuit. South of that is Cote de Beaune and Cote de Beaune is named Cote de Beaune because of its proximity to the big city of Beaune and Beaune is famous for the Hospice de Beaune the charity auction each year it's a beautiful city to visit I've never visited I hope to go in the next couple of years and I always had the misconception because of Hospice de Beaune that it was like a red wine producing region like it's known for red wines it's actually known for its white wines of course it makes red wines but the majority of wines in this region and what it's really known for is white wines uh Corton and Montrachet and all the you know different um side regions of Montrachet so it's more more for white wines so that I think makes it easier Cote de Nuit really good red wines Cote de Beaune really good white wines acknowledging that there's obviously these are generalizations then we go more south which is Cote Chalonnaise so that is the Chalon slope right that's a major city there and it's known for value red wines so uh it's going to also be known for a sparkling called Cremant de Beaune which is made in a city a region called Roulis and also for Aligote which is made in a region called a city called Bouzeron so again this is generalizations but that's where you can get some value right and then more south is going to be the and that's again famous or known for white affordable white wines so this is kind of I want to make it very simple for people and kind of I know it's a generalization but in your mind what I'm thinking well for red wines if you want expensive ones Cote de Nuit uh it more value uh Cote Chalonnaise Chalonnaise for white wines if you want expensive Cote de Beaune if you want value Macanay I know these are generalizations and sorry going back to Macanay one of the famous wines is uh Regis Pouilly Foussé which I think people have heard but that's a Chardonnay type grape from Macanay doesn't get the uh I guess the um star power that you get from Cote de Beaune but still made from Chardonnay grape so you'll notice you know all these are called a lot of these are called like Slope of Nuit, Slope de Beaune, Slope of Beaune, Slope of uh Chalonnaise so there must be some reason right and I think to me that's like obviously if everything is named after a slope slope is really important in Burgundy that's the that's the truth so slope when we talk about terroir in Burgundy there's two really really really important concepts that you need to know and again every region has its different kind of cheat codes and things like that so and what you look for but in Burgundy it's slope and it's direction of your vineyard okay so slope it's really important again I'm making generalizations but let's say we have a slope and this is probably very bad for the wine but most wineries in Burgundy are on the east are facing east and they're sloping eastwards okay and so what you'll generally find is the top wineries the grand cruz are always in the middle of the slope then the premier cruz are the top of the slope followed by village wines kind of down a little bit more and on the bottom of the slope is going to be the AOC wines so that's gen again these are generalizations sun usually comes from the east or the southeast so this is the direction of the sun and so what happens you know this I'm trying to kind of explain this in a general term I'm not a wine maker I'm not a geologist but just in general terms that I hope at least I how I kind of understand it makes it easy to understand so sun comes from the south or southeast so it comes across and so the ones in the middle of the slope have the best sunshine exposure because they get the sun in the early morning which is kind of intense but still has some cooling effect and then at the end of the day it actually gets the sun at the apex and then at the end of the day the sun really isn't that sun at the end of the day when it's kind of at the sun sunset it's not really that useful right for grapes because there's no real heat produced so really at the end of the day it doesn't get very much but that's okay if you look at how if you have a slope and you have a sun coming this way this grape the grapes at the middle will get the most even sun exposure followed by the ones at the top the ones at the bottom because they're located at the bottom of the slope they will only get kind of sun for half the day right because another half a day it'll be blocked by the land or the terroir ahead of it in the slope so they won't get such an even sun the other thing is that when you get sun in the morning it's going to be more delicate it's going to be more softer which Pinot Noir grapes like they like soft as you get to the apex this is going to be the hottest sun and you get harsher getting more tannins but that's probably not as delicate a grape so kind of that's how I explain it the the key components to Burgundy to understand Burgundy is slope and direction of the the vineyard and very very few Burgundy vineyards are located westerly slope because if you were doing westerly slope you'd basically get no sun in the morning and then you'd get the very little sun for a couple of hours at the apex and then you'd get the sunset which is really not that great for grapes knowing this about Burgundy what's the buying or drinking strategy if you're starting out and I'm going to give you this because I've been doing it around all these years because I've always drank the higher end Côte du Nuit and Côte d'Ivoire regions thinking well you got to drink those regions and I've you've seen my other videos I said well you've got to buy a little bit higher end you gotta go Premier Cru because you know that's where you get the good you know terroir and that's where you get the essence of Burgundy well I think I've got that a little bit wrong because now knowing that you've got two regions Côte Chalanaise and Mâconais which are value regions I think the strategy would be to go and when you're beginning drink Mâconais and Côte Chalanaise first because you've got Mâconais with the white wines and Chalanaise with the red wines and so that to me would make more sense than to start at the top so again there's different strategies with Bordeaux I have a strategy if you look at my videos I say you should drink from the top down with Burgundy I think you should drink with from value up but the caveat is don't drink the top the top end regions drink the value regions and the best wines of the value regions so instead of the entry-level wines of the higher class regions that's kind of where I think I would start and that's where I'm gonna start you're gonna see me probably do some videos on the Mâconais and Côte Chalanaise region because I've always thought of them as kind of just inferior regions but they're not inferior regions to Côte de Nuit or Côte de Beaux they're just different regions and wouldn't you want to drink the best of these value regions rather than drink the kind of the lowest end of the the really good regions it's kind of a it's kind of a philosophical thing but I think that works out and I'm a big sports person so I'm going to make a sports analogy it's kind of like if you have a player that you try to develop or you try to develop a skill would you rather have that person develop it in the minor leagues and play lots of minutes and get lots of activity or would you rather have them go to the major leagues and just sit there and do nothing in my opinion for the development of that player and for the development of a wine drinker it's better to drink really good stuff of a value region than to drink the kind of inferior stuff of a higher region so that's kind of where I'm going to make a change in how I view things because in the past I've really never drank a lot of Mâconais and Côte Chalanaise region thinking they are kind of inferior wines to but in fact really they're probably just great value wines and so if you're going to start in Burgundy that's probably the place to start that's where I'm going to drink. Hope you enjoyed this video and I'm really excited because this is kind of in doing the research for this video it really opened my eyes to the regions of Côte Chalanaise and Mâconais and that's probably if I do another video on this series so again let me know please if you like what I'm doing on this series please like subscribe give your comments and the next video in this series will probably be either on the Mâconais or the Côte Chalanaise region which I have really under appreciated all these years so I'm going to try and start to drink some of those to try to start to understand the essence of Burgundy a little bit better until next time happy drinking