The Mâconnais on the Move

The Mâconnais region of southern Burgundy, an area with a long history of vine cultivation, has been radically transformed in recent decades. And the best is yet to come. There are still outstanding sites to be discovered and exploited in this large region bordered on the north by the Côte Chalonnaise and on the south by Beaujolais. Global warming has created the opportunity to ripen fruit in previously marginal areas. Even more important, a new generation of growers favoring quality over quantity has gotten far more serious about controlling yields and making wines with greater complexity, depth and potential longevity.

Vineyards in Solutré

From Backwater to Front Burner

As recently as the mid-1980s, the Mâconnais merited only a brief mention in books on the world’s fine wines. Pouilly-Fuissé was far and away the most important product of the region, although the business was controlled by a handful of négociants, most of them based outside the Mâconnais and simply interested in making large quantities of decent, bargain-priced wine. At the time, the American market absorbed an astounding 70% of this wine, as for casual consumers “fussy pussy” became synonymous with affordable, easy-drinking Chardonnay. (More than 90% of the region’s production is Chardonnay, the rest Gamay and Pinot Noir.)

Saint-Véran was typically the only other Mâconnais wine mentioned in wine books in the ‘80s, and this appellation had only been created in 1971 (its wines were previously bottled as Macon-Villages or Beaujolais blanc). The generic categories called Mâcon (blanc) and Mâcon (blanc) Supérieur, the latter then in the process of being changed to Mâcon-Villages, were of little interest to export markets. These wines were generally made at very high crop levels and did not have the concentration or structure to last more than a couple years in bottle. Few growers could get high enough prices for them even to consider making more serious wines.

The Mâconnais was also hurt by its failure to adopt a classification system of its top sites, as the Côte d’Or did in the 1930s. Without any official premier crus, the region’s labels were mostly opaque to consumers, who had little more than a few general place names and a smattering of well-known producer names to drive their buying decisions. To this day there are no official premier or grand crus in the region, only five village “crus”: Pouilly-Fuissé (which includes the villages of Chaintré, Fuissé, Solutré-Pouilly and Vergisson), Pouilly-Vinzelles, Pouilly-Loché, Saint Véran and Viré-Clessé. Happily, a premier cru system for Pouilly-Fuissé is in the works, and once this politically challenging project has been completed, consumers will be able to find and appreciate wines from favored sites that possess terroir character potentially every bit as distinctive as those of the Côte de Beaune. The Mâconnais, after all, shares geographic origins with the Côte d’Or, and benefits from similarly complex argilo-calcaire soils, with a range of rocks, marl, sandstone, granite and schist thrown into the mix. In fact, the series of limestone-rich outcroppings in Pouilly-Fuissé, many of them featuring very shallow topsoil over rock, also offer a wider range of expositions than are found in the Côte d’Or.