Côte de Beaune

The inversion

The Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune form a single, continuous escarpment, but they do not tell the same story. The Côte de Nuits, from Dijon to Corgoloin, is Pinot Noir's near-exclusive domain and holds, from Gevrey-Chambertin to Vosne-Romanée, every red grand cru of the Côte-d'Or except Corton. The Côte de Beaune, its continuation southwards from Ladoix-Serrigny, inverts that hierarchy: this is where the Côte-d'Or's white grands crus lie — Corton-Charlemagne, Montrachet, Chevalier-Montrachet and others — Musigny being the only Côte de Nuits grand cru that also makes a little white. Pinot Noir still keeps its mostly red villages here: Beaune, Pommard, Volnay. The inversion can be read in the appellations themselves, in the colour of their grands crus.

The landscape changes too. The Côte de Beaune is wider and more open, with marl climbing higher up the slope than in the Côte de Nuits. Chardonnay dominates at Meursault, Puligny and Chassagne; Pinot Noir holds most of the hillsides of Beaune, Pommard, Volnay or Savigny. What the soil does to a wine's taste is still debated, so no style should be read into it.

Three great whites, three different reasons

It would be easy, and wrong, to sum up Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet with the same sentence — "great white Burgundy." Each deserves a fact that genuinely sets it apart from the other two.

Meursault has no grand cru at all — a singularity among the three, and one the appellation's own specification, homologated by the order of 4 June 2026, frames historically: "At a time when Burgundy's fine wines were overwhelmingly red, 'Meursault' stood out for its essentially white production, in contrast to neighbouring villages such as Pommard or Volnay." Its highest-ranked climats are its nineteen premiers crus.

Puligny-Montrachet, by contrast, holds, alone or shared with its neighbour, four of the five grands crus of the Montrachet family: Chevalier-Montrachet and Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet belong to it entirely, while Montrachet and Bâtard-Montrachet are split between Puligny and Chassagne. According to its specification, Pinot Noir covers only about 1% of its area.

Chassagne-Montrachet shares two of those same grands crus with Puligny (Montrachet and Bâtard-Montrachet) and holds the fifth, Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet, entirely to itself. But Chassagne stands apart for its red output: on average 5,300 hectolitres of red to nearly 10,400 of white a year, according to its specification (2008 figures), about a third red.

Beaune, Pommard, Volnay: the Côte's red heart

Beaune lends its name to the whole sub-region without being its viticultural summit: the town is first and foremost the historic capital of the Burgundian wine trade, home to the Hôtel-Dieu, founded in 1443, and to the Hospices de Beaune charity sale, whose harvest is auctioned every third Sunday of November for the hospital's benefit. Like Meursault, the Beaune appellation has no grand cru; it has forty-two climats classified as premier cru.

Pommard and Volnay, next-door villages, both make red wine only. Pommard's specification describes wines of firm structure whose velvet and fruit give finesse and ageing potential. Volnay's specification speaks of wines of great finesse, and tradition nicknames Volnay "the ladies' wine". The same text, homologated by the order of 20 February 2026, recalls that nineteenth-century writers placed Volnay "at the summit of Burgundy's wine hierarchy."

A sub-region best read through its contrasts

The Côte de Beaune, then, has no single identity — it has several, stacked on the same escarpment. White in almost all its grands crus, red at its heart; no grand cru at Meursault or Beaune, rich in grands crus at Puligny. It is this diversity of closely packed terroirs — more than any single appellation taken alone — that makes the Côte de Beaune a good place to understand Burgundy's idea of the climat: two neighbouring plots, on the same hillside, can give different wines.