Approaching Auxey-Duresses you cross an austere countryside, nothing in sight but grapevine. Not a tree or a hedge to break the monotonous lines. For a long time the vine belonged to the rich and powerful. With the arrival of the phylloxera crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, the great vineyards fell apart and the farm workers finally became the proprietors of the land they had worked for so long, yet never owned. The conjuncture of soil and climate explain the extreme concentration of vineyards along the narrow band along the hillside. Below the

vineyards, the plateau, swept by wind is left uncultivated, whereas the land above is a humid plain worked by farmers. Crossing a few meters, one moves from misfortune to wealth. For nearly eighteen centuries vineyards have been worked in Bourgogne. The countryside has evidently changed. They weren't the same vines nor, for that matter, the same wines. But what remains is that particular devotion of the vineyards' owners, that mix of know-how and intuition, with, deep down, the well-founded certainty that nature will always have the last word.