Gevrey-Chambertin

In 1847, the village of Gevrey did something audacious: it legally appended the name of its most prestigious vineyard, Chambertin, to its own. The move was pure marketing genius, capitalizing on Napoleon’s well-documented obsession with Chambertin wines during his military campaigns. The gambit worked so spectacularly that it sparked a naming frenzy across Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. Puligny became Puligny-Montrachet, Nuits became Nuits-Saint-Georges, and eventually eleven villages hyphenated themselves to glory, each hitching their wagon to their most famous terroir.

The village had help making its case. An 11th-century priory on its outskirts, later fortified into the Château de Gevrey-Chambertin, had been producing wine under Cluny’s Benedictine monks for eight centuries by the time anyone thought to rebrand. Napoleon just gave the marketing department something to work with. Eleven villages followed Gevrey’s lead, none of them quite as convincingly, proof that in Burgundy, a good vineyard can rename an entire town, but only the first one gets remembered for it.