Aligoté is Burgundy's other white grape, long relegated to the valley flats while Chardonnay kept the slopes. Bouzeron, a fold of the Côte Chalonnaise, reversed the sentence: here the finer aligoté doré strain grows on genuine hillsides, and in 1998 the village received the only appellation in France devoted to the grape alone.
Its champion was Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, who farmed at Bouzeron for decades and argued that Aligoté on real slopes was a different wine altogether. Elsewhere in Burgundy the grape's usual fate is Canon Kir's famous aperitif, softened with crème de cassis; in Bouzeron — lemon, white flower, chalk — it needs nothing added.