Burgundy Cote de Beaune
— — the gold the September sun leaves in the rows.
Not only on a wall.
“A twenty-five-kilometre run of east-facing slope below the Hautes-Côtes, where the Côte d'Or escarpment turns south of Beaune. The vineyards are not one big estate; they are climats, small named parcels sometimes the width of a footpath, that the Cistercians began mapping in the twelfth century and UNESCO recognised in 2015. Pinot Noir on the upper slopes around Pommard and Volnay, Chardonnay on the limestone shelf at Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet. In late September the rows go gold for about a week. The polychrome roof of the Hospices de Beaune is visible across the plain.
Burgundy Cote de Beaune, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Côte de Beaune is the southern half of the Côte d'Or escarpment, the eastern flank of a low limestone ridge in the Burgundy region of eastern France. The run is roughly 25 kilometres long, from the village of Ladoix-Serrigny in the north to the Maranges at the southern end, with the town of Beaune at its midpoint. Vineyards face east and southeast at elevations between 220 and 380 metres, sheltered from western weather by the wooded Hautes-Côtes behind them. The whole strip is part of the Climats du vignoble de Bourgogne, inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as a cultural landscape of named parcels stretching back to monastic estate-mapping in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The defining feature is limestone: specifically, the Middle Jurassic marl and oolitic limestone of the Bajocian and Bathonian stages, weathered into thin brown soils over fractured rock. The slope dips gently east at five to ten degrees, just enough that water drains and morning sun reaches the vines before noon. Within that geology the appellations split by metre rather than by hectare. Pommard sits on iron-rich brown soil that gives a structured red wine; Meursault sits on paler limestone that gives a broad-shouldered white; Puligny-Montrachet sits on a stonier rise where the soil thins to almost nothing. The Romans planted here in the first century AD, and the Cistercians of Cîteaux Abbey, founded in 1098, drew the first parcel maps that the modern climats still follow.
The vineyards turn gold for a short window in late September and early October, between the start of the harvest (the vendange, declared each year by the local prefecture as the ban des vendanges) and the first hard frost of November. Most domaines pick by hand because the climat parcels are small: a single grower may own half a hectare in Volnay, a tenth of a hectare in Meursault, and a single row in Chambertin further north. The third weekend of November brings the Hospices de Beaune auction at the Hôtel-Dieu, held without interruption since 1859 and administered by Christie's since 2005, where each year's wine is sold by the barrel for the hospice's charitable work.