The 'vignoble bourguignon' (Burgundy vineyard) is very small and spreads only on 28.300 hectares of land. The 'Grand Cru' (highest quality wines) represent only 0.7% of the entire vineyard of France. A little bit less than 3000 vinegrowers' small companies process their own wines with a heavily regulated small production limited by law.

In fact, to obtain a burgundy wine, you are allowed to use only five types of grapes: for the Red wine, you use the Pinot Noir grapes for the 'grand vin de Bourgogne' and the Gamay grapes for the Beaujolais wines. For the White wines, you use the Chardonnay grape, the aligote grapes and the Sauvignon grapes.

There are about 130 labels of wine in Burgundy: 65 of them are located between the cote de Beaune and Cote de Nuits and features the best wines in the World.

You may have had the feeling that we can find the best and the worse in the burgundy wine production and it is true. One of the reasons is because the same label can be represented by 60 different wine growers and they are not on the same level of quality: for example, le 'Clos de Vougeot' is shared by more than 70 proprietors.

Also, the 2 major grapes used to produce the burgundy wines are very difficult to work with: on one hand, the Chardonnay grape is very soft and adaptable to a lot of type of vinification. The pinot noir grape, on the other hand, is very sensitive and delicate.

Finally, in the area, the weather can be very different from one year to another and the level of sun in this region runs the production game: one year, it will make the best wine on earth and the year after, the worse.

A good year for a burgundy wine is a year with no ice in the spring, a nice sweet month of June to get nice flowers and a warm summer without any excess of high temperature and with some light rains and a dry and hot month of September. As you can imagine, it does not always work like this. Sometimes during the year, everything seems perfect to get the perfect wine and suddenly, in September, heavy rains just destroyed all the dreams.