White Burgundy

What distinguishes white Burgundy from ambitious Chardonnay elsewhere is restraint. The oak supports rather than flavours, the texture comes from lees as much as from wood, and the acidity is never sacrificed for ripeness.

Meursault is the fullest and nuttiest, Puligny-Montrachet the most precise and mineral, Chassagne-Montrachet somewhere between. These are real and consistent differences, not marketing.

The Mâconnais to the south offers the same grape, warmer and rounder, at considerably lower prices.

White Burgundy is Chardonnay, and the label almost never says so. That single fact unlocks more of the region than any other, because a reader who likes Meursault has no way of connecting it to anything else without being told.

The range within it is very wide. Chablis in the north is lean, high in acidity and usually unoaked; the Côte de Beaune is fuller and barrel-fermented; the Mâconnais is riper and rounder; and the difference between a Petit Chablis and a Bâtard-Montrachet is as large as the difference between two countries.

Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet are a kilometre apart and consistently different — Meursault broader, nuttier and more buttery, Puligny tauter and more mineral-toned. Soil differs, and so historically did winemaking: Meursault growers used more new oak, more lees stirring and fuller malolactic conversion. Both have moved towards freshness since the 2000s.

Premature oxidation — bottles from the mid-1990s onwards browning and going flat years earlier than expected — was a serious and widely acknowledged problem in white Burgundy. Causes proposed include changes in cork treatment, lower sulphur additions and increased lees stirring; no single explanation is settled, and the incidence has fallen since the 2010s.

Prices have risen sharply, and the useful value now lies in the outlying villages — Saint-Aubin, Rully, Montagny, Saint-Véran — rather than the famous ones.