Burgundy Vineyard Winter Dawn
— — the pink the dawn leaves on the rows.
Not only on a wall.
“The Côte d'Or in late November, when the harvest is two months gone and the leaves have dropped from the vines. The rows run in long parallel lines down the slope between Dijon and Beaune, the same rows that have grown Pinot Noir for the better part of a thousand years, walked by Cistercian monks and the families who took the work from them. At dawn the light comes in pink across the limestone ridge to the west, and a layer of mist still sits over the Saône plain to the east. The vines are pruned hard, almost skeletal. The colour does not need leaves to be there.
Burgundy Vineyard Winter Dawn, 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 d'Or is the central limestone escarpment of Burgundy, running roughly sixty kilometres south from Dijon to Santenay in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of eastern France. The vineyards face east and south-east across the Saône plain at elevations of about 220 to 380 metres. Since 2015 the slope has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name Climats, terroirs of Burgundy, recognising the 1,247 precisely demarcated vineyard parcels (the climats) that subdivide it. The Côte is split into two halves: the Côte de Nuits to the north, where Pinot Noir dominates, and the Côte de Beaune to the south, where Chardonnay takes over. The market town of Beaune sits at the hinge between them.
Winter dawn over the Côte d'Or is short and slow. In December and January the sun rises in Beaune around 08:20 and sits low against the limestone ridge for the first hour after it clears the horizon. The east-facing slope catches the light first, pulling the rows out of the blue half-dark in long parallel stripes. Mist often pools in the Saône plain below and burns off slowly as the temperature rises through the morning. The vineyards are at their stillest in this window: pickers gone, tractors quiet, the soil unworked. Local growers describe the period between harvest and pruning as the only quiet the Côte ever gets. The colour is in the bare wood and the frost.
The vine year in Burgundy turns on the winter pruning, called la taille, carried out between late December and March. Growers walk every row of every climat, deciding by hand which cane to keep and which to cut back to two buds, a decision that sets the next season's yield and balance. The work is cold, slow, and skilled. The vines themselves are fully dormant: no leaves, no sap movement, the bare wood holding against frost down to about minus ten Celsius before serious damage occurs. The first sign of the new year is the budburst, called le débourrement, in late March or early April, which begins the most anxious six weeks of the calendar as growers watch the overnight forecasts for spring frost on the open slope.