Organization of Burgundian vineyards

The vineyards of Burgundy, especially those of the Côte d’Or, are the most minutely parcellated in the world. This is mainly because the land has been continuously managed and owned by individual smallholders—there was no influx of outside capital with which to establish great estates as in bordeaux. But the combination of the Napoleonic Code, with its insistence on equal inheritance for every family member, and the fact that the land has proved so valuable, has meant that small family holdings have been divided and subdivided over generations. One vineyard, or climat, as it is known in this, the cradle of terroir, may therefore be owned by scores of different individual owners, each of them cultivating sometimes just a row or two of vines (see clos de vougeot, for example).