Twenty-Four Hours in Burgundy
A brief winter visit reveals why Burgundy endures across centuries of change.
The sky was cloudy and rainy. I hadn’t seen the sun for several days. The wheels of my suitcase rattled on the cobblestone streets of Paris as I approached the Gare de Bercy. The previous three days I had been largely confined to the enormous halls of the Porte de Versailles, a convention center so aggressively utilitarian that it seems designed to make you forget that you are in Paris. Every February practically the entire wine world descends on this spot to pop corks and talk business. For someone in my line of work, the experience is first rate, but the setting never is. After three days of bad lighting and the unrelenting murmur of a thousand simultaneous conversations, I was in desperate need of a change of scenery.
In three hours, I would be in Beaune, the small city at the heart of France’s Burgundy, or Bourgogne, wine region. And the following morning, if all went according to plan, I would likely be tasting something extraordinary in the cellar of my friend Damien. In Paris I had encountered dozens of friends and colleagues from across the world. But not Damien. Burgundians generally don’t bother with the big wine shows. They never seem to have anything to sell.
It was dark by the time I arrived in Beaune. Departing the train and looking across the tracks, I spotted my hotel, the Hôtel de France, conveniently located a short walk away. Restless from hours of sitting and gazing at the overcast French countryside, I dropped off my bags and went for a walk along the Rue du Château towards the center of town.
The cobblestone streets were uneven and slippery as I ambled along the narrow medieval pathways enclosed by ancient ramparts. These thick stone walls were built and rebuilt over many centuries, their earliest layers dating to a Roman fortification erected here. Making my way carefully over the wet stones, it occurred to me that almost everything underfoot and overhead had been built on top of something older.
Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the first century BCE brought Roman civilization to this part of Europe, and as Romans tended to do, they planted vines on the slopes beyond the town. It turns out these hillsides possessed something they couldn’t have fully understood at the time, a convergence of limestone soils and an eastward aspect that would make these slopes among the most celebrated pieces of agricultural land on earth. The Romans eventually departed. The vines remained.
It was the Church that first grasped what these hillsides were capable of. The Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, founded in 910, was among the first institutions to acquire vineyard land in Burgundy at significant scale. In doing so they established a principle that would prove decisive. By placing these slopes under the stewardship of the Church, the vineyards were shielded from the disruptions of inheritance, warfare, and political fortune that plagued secular landholdings. A great vineyard could now outlast the person who planted it.
Then in 1098, reform-minded monks founded the Abbey of Cîteaux just east of Beaune. Where Cluny had brought scale and permanence, the Cistercians brought an intimate obsession with the land itself. They tasted, observed, and mapped the hillsides into named parcels, each possessing its own decisive character. Thus, was born the Burgundian climat, the idea that a specific piece of ground has an identity all its own. It is to the Cistercians that we owe the very notion of terroir.
By the time the Dukes of Burgundy rose to power in the fourteenth century they inherited a wine culture already centuries deep. They made Beaune the commercial heart of their realm and understood the diplomatic value of what the monks had built. Burgundian wines had become a currency of prestige, poured for kings and sent to foreign courts. Duke Philip the Bold was so protective of this inheritance that in 1395 he issued an edict banning Gamay from the Côte d’Or, insisting on the primacy of Pinot Noir and establishing a hierarchy that endures to this day.
As the rain continued to fall, I pulled my hood up over my black, White Sox cap and kept walking. The streets were empty. Somewhere beneath my feet, in the cellars that honeycomb the ground beneath Beaune, the wines of the current vintage slept. Pretty soon, I would do the same.
….
The next morning, we greeted each other in the small lobby of the Hôtel de France.
“Ça va, Brett! Bien dormi?” said Damien.
“Oui. Très bien, merci!” I replied, exhausting nearly all the French I can speak.
After the half-handshake, half-embrace that Americans default to with old friends they haven’t seen in years, I packed my bags into his car and we drove north out of town, into the vines.
The ride north from Beaune to the small village of Corgoloin, the southern gateway to the Côte de Nuits, takes about twenty minutes. To the west it is easy to pick out the massive hill of Corton, an immense, tree-crowned mound rising above the valley floor, the slopes of which are covered with grape vines. Charlemagne himself was said to have favored the wines made from grapes grown here, though legend has it that as he aged his long white beard became inconveniently stained red by them. Mindful of the dignity of an emperor, a section of the hill was ordered to be replanted with white grapes. This fabled vineyard, planted now with Chardonnay, eventually came to bear his name, Corton-Charlemagne.
In a short while we arrived at the pebbly drive of Damien Gachot, an understated but impressive stone structure on the edge of the village, looking out over vineyards that stretch east toward the horizon. The building also houses his winery and cellar, where he makes and matures wines from parcels spread across the Côte de Nuits. In a typical year he produces a few thousand cases from his own vineyards across four primary appellations: Bourgogne Côte d’Or, Côtes de Nuits-Villages, Nuits-Saint-Georges, and Chambolle-Musigny. But in this era, typical seems to be rare. Frost, hail, and persistent rainfall hammered 2024, and excessive heat and poor flowering did the same in 2025. Being an independent winemaker in Burgundy is a lot like mining for gold. Occasionally nature offers a bonanza, but most of the time one works tirelessly to obtain whatever gleaming sliver of brightness the earth decides to yield.
He opened a side door and we entered a cozy room with stone walls, a small modern kitchen and a spiral staircase winding upwards to the residence. On a long table sat several bottles marked only with chalk, beside them a row of empty glasses. Damien began pulling corks.
“2024 is what we call l’année du vigneron,” he said with a knowing smile. “It was not a great year for volume. To maintain quality we had to be very selective.”
By “we” Damien meant not just his own operation but the whole community of growers who share a solemn, collective responsibility for Burgundy’s reputation, an unspoken obligation that runs deep within the generations who farm this place.
Taking a sip of his 2024 Bourgogne Rouge Côte d’Or, I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t told me. The wine was precise and lively with intense red cherry and raspberry flavors framed by shapely tannins. His Côtes de Nuits-Villages carried the same ripe red fruit at its core, but also the pleasurable scent of violets, faint but unmistakable.
Then came his Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru “Les Poulettes,” made from vines approaching a half century in age. Old vines have a way of deepening the conversation between grape and soil. The wine was perfumed and expansive, filling the air around the glass with an intensity that transported me somewhere warmer and sunnier.
The last red was his Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru, also from 2024. Chambolle sits on soils where limestone runs close to the surface, and the wines it produces have a silky, almost weightless quality that distinguishes them from anything else on the Côte de Nuits. Damien’s was no exception. It was more darkly fruited than the Nuits, with fresh black cherries and traces of spice from maturation in newer oak. Generations of critics have exhausted their best adjectives trying to describe what makes Chambolle different, and sitting there staring at my notebook, pencil in hand, I understood completely why many of them never quite got there.
Already this was a very pleasant way to spend a morning. Damien set down the last of the red wine glasses and uncorked a bottle of white.
Chardonnay may be the headliner white grape of Burgundy, but it’s by no means the only one. Lighter in body and higher in acidity, Aligoté typically plays the best supporting role, and because of this, bottles tend to be among the most surprisingly pleasant and affordably priced whites in the region. The glass of Bourgogne Aligoté placed in front of me was fresh from the 2025 harvest, brightly colored and aromatically precise, with crisp lemon citrus mellowed by a delightful creamy texture. It is the kind of white Burgundy that makes you want to buy two bottles, and makes it very easy to do so.
The Bourgogne Blanc 2024, made from 100% Chardonnay, came next. Everyone who claims to detest Chardonnay probably hasn’t tasted much white Burgundy. An early ripening variety, Chardonnay will grow just about anywhere, but not well everywhere. On these hills, in this climate, grown upon the chalky remnants of an ancient seabed, it achieves a level of nuance and harmony that winegrowers all over the world try to emulate. This wine was a vivid reminder of why. It had an air of fragrant lemon citrus, a hint of crushed stone, and a soft texture with a bright tangy finish. This was Chardonnay for people who love wine.
With a little twinkle in his eye, Damien poured the last wine, a Côte de Nuits Blanc 2024 “Les Monts de Boncourt.” Despite its position in the north, the Côte de Nuits is mostly known for its reds. There are fewer whites planted, and then only when the soil content is right. Chardonnay likes limestone, and in this vineyard the bedrock rises close to the surface beneath only a thin layer of topsoil. The vine’s roots dig right into the rock below. If wine had a voice, this one would be Whitney Houston. Expressive and clear, it possessed aromas I gave up trying to list and a finish that simply refused to end. I don’t have favorite wines as much as favorite wine memories, and this one just made the list.
….
As if on cue, through the door bounded a spirited black Labrador followed by Lise, Damien’s spouse of many years.
“Is this Molly?” I asked, delighted.
“No. This is Frea. She’s new. Molly is upstairs,” Lise replied. “Are you hungry? Lunch is ready.”
We walked upstairs to the main house and were seated at a long dining table set for lunch. A contemporary painting of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE image hung in the center of the room. Born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Indiana’s LOVE sculpture has stood since 1976, I couldn’t have felt more at home. This time Molly, the other black Lab, greeted me at the table carrying a shoe in her mouth. She always had a shoe with her. Damien and Lise’s 22 year old daughter also joined us along with her boyfriend.
“Joyeux anniversaire!” I proclaimed in my best French, severely muddled by my Delco accent. Her birthday was the day before.
“Thank you so much. Great to see you again,” she replied in English.
The four of us sat down to a table filled with plates of roast duck, sautéed vegetables, mashed potatoes and a basket of fresh bread. After a brief moment, Damien emerged from his cellar with a dusty bottle of 2016 Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru “Les Poulettes.”
“Voilà,” he declared.
As we ate I was curious about what life was like for young twenty-somethings in France, so I asked the two young people what they liked to do for fun.
“We like to go out together, talk, laugh, sometimes drink and just enjoy ourselves,” she replied.
“It’s true,” the boyfriend added, “but too often people of our generation put each other down when we should be lifting each other up. We are public with our social media and private in real life, and it should be the opposite.”
I had come to Burgundy to learn about wine. I hadn't expected to be taking notes on anything else. Some lessons arrive when you aren’t looking for them. I wrote that down in my Moleskine next to the description of Chambolle-Musigny and reached for a slice of an amazing looking raspberry tart that Lise had placed nearby.
….
“Shall we finish in the cellar?” said Damien.
For the next half hour he moved through the barrel rows, wine thief in hand, pulling samples of 2025s: Bourgogne Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Aligoté, Côtes de Nuits-Villages, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Chambolle-Musigny Premier Crus, and a surprise Volnay. At one point, gesturing across the cellar, he mentioned that the previous year half of these barrels had been empty. He was grateful, he said, to have a fuller cellar this year. It is not easy to work with so little wine. But this, he made clear, is what it means to be a winemaker in Burgundy. The goal is not to maximize volume and profit. The goal is to preserve a reputation earned over more than two thousand years of farming these hillsides.
Then, choosing his words carefully, he offered the clearest summary of Burgundy’s philosophy I have yet heard.
“In Bordeaux they protect the name of the Château individually, but here in Burgundy we protect the name of the appellation together.”
It is a remarkable way to think about a place and the people who look after it. The prestige of Burgundy belongs collectively to everyone who farms here, and because of that collective ownership, no single person can sell it off or compromise it without answering to the rest. In almost any other context, wine names this valuable would long ago have been acquired, scaled, and quietly hollowed out. Its famous place names and celebrated climats sold to the highest bidder, its bottles gradually filled with lesser wine at full price, and its reputation spent like inherited money until there was nothing left. It is the trajectory of countless wine brands around the world. Burgundy, so far, has resisted it. And standing in Damien's cellar on a grey February morning, glass in hand, I thought I understood a little better. Those medieval monks had figured most of this out a thousand years ago. Not bad for a bunch of Cistercians who have been gone for centuries.
The drive to the train station felt much shorter. I had arrived less than 24 hours earlier and already I was making my way back to Paris. In another 24 hours I would be home in Boston.
One more handshake and half embrace for Damien. The ceremonious double kiss on opposite cheeks for Lise. One American way and one French way to say goodbye.
Sitting alone on the platform waiting for the train, I thought about what keeps drawing a person back to a place like this. It had been more than three years since my last visit and yet it felt exactly as I remembered it, simple, beautiful, and somehow hopeful. People connected to the ground beneath them and to each other in ways that are increasingly rare and difficult to explain.
As a boy I liked to play in the dirt. In a sense that is what they continue to do in Burgundy, though perhaps sculpt is the better word, patiently crafting and nurturing the ground into something that ends up in a glass on a table somewhere, carrying all of that patience and attention with it. And somehow, without quite knowing how, a piece of it ended up with me too.
It is not quite like falling in love, though it shares something with that. Like an infatuation that never fully resolves, it persists even though it can't be touched. It just lives there, like a dream you are glad to keep having.
The train arrived. I picked up my bag and got on.
Author’s Note
Domaine Gachot-Monot is a fifth-generation family estate located in Corgoloin at the southern edge of the Côte de Nuits. Damien Gachot has farmed the domaine’s holdings since 1993, producing wines widely regarded as outstanding values in Burgundy. The wines are imported into the United States by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant and are available through kermitlynch.com and fine wine retailers nationwide.
For those who wish to explore Burgundy further, two books stand out. Clive Coates MW, who passed away in 2022, devoted decades to documenting the region; his The Wines of Burgundy (University of California Press, 2008) remains a definitive reference. Jasper Morris MW’s Inside Burgundy (2nd edition, 2021) is an equally indispensable companion, offering deep insight into the vineyards, villages, and producers. Both reward the curious reader.
That was a good read & a proper reflection of the domaine. I have bought annually from G-M for over a decade. Damien & Lise are genuinely nice people, who really care about the domaine & its future.
I enjoyed the Burgundy article and the audio recording.