Burgundy’s Aligoté wine — chardonnay’s poor relation or something more intriguing?

Wines by Aubert de Villaine (below) command some of the highest prices in the world. He is a co-owner of France’s fabled Domaine de la Romanée-Conti estate, the wines of which are collected and cherished by oenophiles and create a competitive bidding frenzy at auctions.

I recently made my first trip to Burgundy, where my wonderful guide, Youri, was the proud proprietor of a bespoke tour company called Bourgogne Gold. Of course, being a typical tourist, the first place I asked to see was the Romanée-Conti vineyards.

After a short drive from Chablis, on a cold, windy day, we saw a horse, her coat spattered with mud, pulling a plough guided by her handler. When they got to the end of a row of vines, the horse stopped, waited for the ploughman to turn the blade around and pat her ears, then plodded towards the next row. It was as if time had stopped. I now saw how much labour, care and atten­tion goes into pro­ducing every drop of Romanée-Conti wine. Yet, despite the mind-boggling prices it commands, I could see no security guards or cameras watching over the vines.

Across the narrow road, just a few metres away, the vineyards of La Grande Rue were also being ploughed, but by a man on a tractor. It was a view that encom­passed both the new and the old, and two very different viti­culture philosophies.

De Villaine isn’t resting on his laurels, however. He has another domain, in Bouzeron, in the Cote Chalonnaise, called A et P de Villaine, where he and his wife, Pamela, make wines from aligoté grapes. He was instrumental in getting the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) rules amended to recognise Bouzeron as its own appellation in 1998. It is the only one of Burgundy’s 44 village appellations that makes wine from aligoté, which some of the region’s winemakers dismiss as chardonnay’s poor cousin.