ABSTRACT
Winemaking in Burgundy begins in the first millennium AD2 and significantly shapes the cultural development of the region. In the Middle Ages, the Church plays a central role in developing winemaking techniques and advancing the notion of cru by which plots of vines are distinguished and classified. This knowledge of the land, or terroir, is a result of generations of experiments in growing techniques, grape varieties and production methods. This medieval ‘renaissance’ (Dion 1959:285-300) in winemaking is also supported by favourable economic conditions brought about by the rise of Burgundy as a wealthy European commercial power under the Valois Dukes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (ibid.). The trading system contributes to the increasingly central role that wine merchants, or negoçiants, play in the growth of the region. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they dominate the wine industry. More than just distributors, the negoçiants buy the grapes from growers, make the wine, and ship it by barrel and bottle to the emerging middle and upper class French and foreign markets. Independent wineries begin to form in the early half of the twentieth century, and they flourish after World War II. The rise of independent wineries occurs in large part due to increasing global trade opportunities presented by foreign distributors that would buy wine directly from the wineries as well as a growing foreign market for French wines in Europe, North American and elsewhere; to the formation of the Appellations
d’Origine Contrôlées (AOC) in the 1930s that guarantee wine quality and origins; and to technological innovations such as the straddler-tractor and temperature-control devices that give winemakers greater control in the vines and winery. While there are numerous
books about wine and its history, there are far fewer studies about the labour practices associated with winemaking and the cultural ideas surrounding these practices.3
