Burgundy's monks never tasted the dirt. They did something far better.

Picture a monk on his knees between two rows of vines. He scoops up a handful of soil, puts it in his mouth, chews, considers, and pronounces: here, a great wine. Ten metres further on, he tries again, winces, and condemns the next plot to mediocrity.

It's a story you'll sometimes hear in Burgundy, and it's a legend. No monastery archive mentions it. Its earliest known trace is an English wine book from the late twentieth century — which itself passes it on as a tale picked up locally.

The real story has less to do with miracles than with patience. It runs for a thousand years, and it explains why, in Burgundy, every plot of vines has a name.

First, the gifts

It all begins with donations. In the seventh century, monks from the Abbey of Bèze clear a hillside they own at Gevrey and plant it with vines. Their clos — the local word for a walled vineyard — still carries their name: Chambertin-Clos de Bèze. In 775, Charlemagne hands most of the hill of Corton to the Abbey of Saint-Andoche at Saulieu.

Legend, naturally, embroidered on this. The emperor, the story goes, kept staining his white beard with red wine, so his wife had white grapes planted to spare it. There's no proof of any of it, but people still drink white Corton-Charlemagne, which is a pleasant way to remember it.

For centuries, dukes, lords and ordinary families keep giving. A vineyard is offered for the good of one's soul, to settle a debt, to get a son into the monastery. And the vines pile up in the hands of the only kind of owner that never dies: a religious community. A lord dies; his heirs split the land, sell it, fight over it. The abbey is still there a hundred years later, with the same vines and the same rule.

The Cistercians roll up their sleeves

At the very end of the eleventh century, a handful of monks from Molesme found the Abbey of Cîteaux, south of Dijon. They want a stricter life, closer to the Rule of Saint Benedict — and working with your hands is part of it.

At Vougeot, they are given vines, then more, then more still, until they have an estate they eventually enclose with walls. Lay brothers — the members of the order charged with the physical work — come over from Cîteaux to tend them. The monks build a vat house and a great cellar there, and their oak presses, each able to swallow several tonnes of grapes at a time, are still standing. You can visit them. They look like siege engines.

The women weren't left out. In 1141, the Cistercian nuns of Notre-Dame de Tart buy a clos at Morey. They keep it until the French Revolution. Since then, the Clos de Tart has changed hands only a handful of times, and it still belongs to a single owner — what Burgundy calls a monopole.

Watching and writing, for centuries

The most valuable thing the monks brought can't be seen on the hillside. It's time.

You can't understand a vineyard in one season. You have to have seen it freeze one year and come through the next, ripen ahead of its neighbour, hold out while the bottom of the slope rots. That kind of knowledge builds up harvest after harvest, and a community that stays put for centuries builds up an enormous amount of it. Especially when it writes things down. The monks keep accounts, inventories, registers of dues. Every plot gets a name in them, copied from one deed to the next until it becomes a place.

At Vosne, the priory of Saint-Vivant is already sorting in the fifteenth century: the grapes from its clos make a wine of their own, the "vin des clos," set apart from the rest of its production. Early in the next century, an inventory drawn up for the priory lists those clos one by one. One of them is called the Clos des Cinq Journaux, named for its size in an old unit of land. Today it is Romanée-Conti.

No one is drawing a map of the grands crus yet. But everything needed to draw one is there: plots with boundaries, names that have stuck, centuries of observation, and a firmly rooted idea that some vineyards are better than others.

The merchants make a clean copy

The Revolution changes everything. Church property is seized and auctioned off. The Clos de Vougeot, held by a single abbey for centuries, ends up divided among dozens of owners. The vines of Saint-Vivant, of Tart, of Cîteaux pass to the bourgeoisie, to bankers, to wine merchants.

But what they buy are plots that already have names, walls and reputations. In the nineteenth century, a Dijon doctor, Jules Lavalle, works his way along the Côte village by village and ranks the climats — Burgundy's word for its named vineyard sites — from the "têtes de cuvée" at the top down to the lowest tiers. In the following century, the appellation system largely adopts his map and writes it into law.

The merchants didn't invent the map of Burgundy. They made a fair copy of a thousand-year-old draft.

What's left in your glass

Now read a few labels again. Clos de Vougeot, Clos de Tart, Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, Romanée-Saint-Vivant: the word "clos," the name of an abbey, the name of a saint. Behind many of the Côte's great names stands a religious community that was given a vineyard, kept it, watched it and wrote it down. Today's winegrowers have inherited that legacy in turn, and they guard it just as scrupulously, name by name, wall by wall. They fought to have these climats inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015 — and the register is still being written, one harvest at a time.

The monk chewing dirt never existed. The one who did is less spectacular and far more impressive: he stayed, he took notes, and he passed it on to people he would never meet.