The Paulée, a cellar of forty wines, a castle written in thistles, and the town where photography was born.
Most people drive past the Côte Chalonnaise on the way from Beaune to the south. In October it holds a party of its own, and it is the best way I know into a part of Burgundy that still lives at village scale.
I lived in Beaune from 2020 to 2024 and still work in Burgundy regularly. When we lived there, we often drove down to the Côte Chalonnaise for the landscape alone: pasture and cattle, cheese makers and beehives, orchards and other farms between the vines. It is more varied than the Côte d’Or, its history runs as deep, and most visitors miss it. In October 2026 we went back for the Paulée weekend. This is what I have learned to notice.
A harvest party of its own
The Paulée de la Côte Chalonnaise is a three day festival in Chalon-sur-Saône that marks the end of the harvest. Wines from the whole Côte Chalonnaise are poured in the streets, the wine brotherhoods parade, and there are concerts and a gala dinner. The city organises it with the growers, the mutual aid societies and the brotherhoods. In 2026 it ran from 16 to 18 October.
In Burgundy a paulée is the meal that closes the harvest, when the people who picked and the people who make the wine sit down at the same table. The best known is Meursault’s, a November lunch where growers bring their best bottles and getting a seat is hard. Chalon’s comes a month earlier and is open to anyone who walks in.
What I noticed first was who walks in front. The brotherhoods parade in velvet robes, the confrérie of Montagny in green and gold, and each village carries its banner and its patron saint on a bed of flowers. Rully’s is a carved wooden Saint Vincent, the patron saint of winegrowers, holding a bunch of grapes. A wine festival shows you how a region sees itself. Here it is the villages first, walking together.
The wines poured come from the five village appellations, Bouzeron, Rully, Mercurey, Givry and Montagny, and from the two regional ones, Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise and Crémant de Bourgogne. One glass was poured in the cloister of Saint-Vincent cathedral, and that is the image I kept.
How to read a wine village
If you want to taste a village before you choose a grower, start at Caveau Givry Vins, in the centre of Givry. It keeps forty bottles open at any time, from twenty one of the village’s estates. You take a glass, a carafe of water and a card for the machines, pour what you want, and pay at the end for what you poured. The flyer lists every plot and every vintage, youngest to oldest.
The reason it exists interested me more than the machines. Our host told us that many visitors never dare knock on a grower’s door: they do not know the etiquette of a tasting, or they worry they will be expected to buy. The caveau is a first door, a place to learn the vocabulary of the village before you meet the people who make it.
It works. The caveau is open, easy and welcoming to visitors, and the woman who runs it speaks several languages. You can taste many producers in one place without any pressure, find the wines you like, and leave knowing which growers you would like to meet.
Then the advice is simple. Phone the grower and go. Call ahead, because these are small family estates and the person who answers may be out on the tractor. Ask about the plots, because the names on the labels are places and growers like to explain them. You are not obliged to buy, but a bottle or two is a good thank you for an hour of someone’s time.
If you would rather not knock alone, this is what our private wine days are for: a day with growers chosen around the questions you bring.
What a hillside remembers
Givry’s vineyard names are an archive. Baptiste Lumpp, who makes wine in Givry with his family, explained it to us at the caveau when my husband, Nicolas Fouilleroux, who teaches our Paris Wine Academy courses, asked him where the village fits in Burgundy’s history.
Before the Revolution, the vines belonged to monks and to the bishops of Chalon. One premier cru still carries that memory in its name: the Cellier aux Moines, the monks’ cellar. After the Revolution the vines passed to families in Chalon, and merchants shipped the wine down the Saône. Then came phylloxera, the wars, and a late start: Givry received its own appellation in 1946.
Around 1770 the historian Claude Courtépée travelled through Burgundy and wrote down which plots of Givry he thought were the best. Baptiste told us those names come back again and again in descriptions of the village through the nineteenth century. If you like to read before you travel, Courtépée is the name to look up.
We also walked the vines with a grower past the clos his grandfather planted, inside its old stone walls. In Burgundy a clos is a vineyard defined by its wall.
A harder harvest, and a changing map
What worries the growers is the present, and climate came up in almost every conversation we had. For generations the challenge was getting grapes ripe. Today it is keeping them fresh, and keeping water in the soil, in a region where irrigation is not allowed. The 2026 harvest was hard, close to devastating in places: the berries were much smaller and there were fewer of them, but what came in was highly concentrated. That will change the style of the vintage across Burgundy, not only here.
The growers also described how the map is shifting. Some clos and slopes that once struggled to ripen now ripen easily, and the style of both the reds and the whites is changing with them. Baptiste belongs to a generation of growers in their twenties and thirties taking over estates in Givry and working on these questions together.
Adaptation is also being planted. At the end of September 2026, near Rully, the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne inaugurated a trial plot of eight new grape varieties, three white and five red, bred from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir crossed with varieties that resist mildew and powdery mildew. The programme, CEPINNOV, began in 2015 with 16,000 seeds. More varieties will join the plot each year until 2029, about forty in all, and a mirror plot is planned in Champagne. The aim is to use fewer vineyard treatments while keeping the character of Burgundy’s wines. If the trials succeed, some could be allowed as minor varieties, at most 10% of a blend, from around 2035 (BIVB).
Five villages, and where to start
The Côte Chalonnaise covers about 2,300 hectares from Chagny to Sercy. It has no grand crus, and this is where I send people who want very good Burgundy at a more approachable price. From north to south, there are five villages to know.
Bouzeron is the only village appellation for Aligoté, and its wine is all Aligoté. The vines sit in a natural amphitheatre you can hike around and look down into. Rully makes more white than red and is a home of Crémant de Bourgogne. Mercurey is the largest appellation, mostly Pinot Noir, and around it you find many of the region’s clos. They are worth walking: the stone walls first built by the monks are still part of the landscape, still marking where one vineyard ends and the next begins. Givry is mostly Pinot Noir, with the Cellier aux Moines among its premiers crus. Montagny, in the south, makes white wine only, from Chardonnay.
A castle written in thistles
Germolles, near Mellecey, is the best preserved residence of the Dukes of Burgundy. Philippe le Hardi bought the estate in 1380 and gave it to his wife, Marguerite de Flandre, in 1381. She turned a stronghold into a country house.
In one room their initials, P and M, still cover the walls, with her emblem between them: the thistle. A medieval house could be read like a page, and this one still can.
What stayed with me is when it was built. Germolles was built in the spirit of the Renaissance long before the Renaissance reached France, in a moment of peace when people believed the wars might be over and it felt safe to build in the valley, open to the gardens and the land around it. That peace did not last long.
The château is privately owned but open to the public; visiting times are on its website. We stayed an hour.
Where photography was born
Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph in 1826 or 1827, from an upper window of his house at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, a few kilometres from Chalon. The Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon keeps a camera obscura you can stand inside.
The museum is free, and one of the best I have visited anywhere. It goes deep into how photography was invented, into the meeting of art and science behind it, optics included, and into the many people who worked together to make it possible. Downstairs, the bookshop carries photographers from all over the world.
After a weekend here you start to notice how much of this region is about looking: the light on a slope, the colour of a wine against a white cloth, a wall painted more than six hundred years ago.
Chalon-sur-Saône as a base
Chalon is the most overlooked base in Burgundy. Its centre is one of the most beautiful I know in the region: medieval streets and small alleyways, with the Saône running right through the town, so an evening walk along the quays is part of the stay. It is also more affordable than Beaune. Wine, food, photography and open country, all within a short drive.
We ate well. On Friday, L’Aromatique, and the best œufs en meurette of my life. On Saturday, Le Chai, where one man runs the room, the kitchen and the cellar. He spent years running wine programmes for two and three star restaurants in Paris before he opened this low lit room in Chalon, and his daughter helps him some evenings. You choose your bottle from his cellar, with his help. Order the Charolais mini burgers with Comté.
For bottles to take home, go to Terroirs & Millésimes in the centre of town, with more than 1,200 wines and spirits from all over France. Lionel, its sommelier, is wonderful at explaining them, the Côte Chalonnaise above all, and Burgundy as a whole. We spent a long evening tasting with him.
If you buy from several estates, or from the shop, international shipping is available, and we help our guests arrange it. Whether it is worth it depends on where you live, because shipping costs, duties and taxes vary by country. For everyday bottles it is often simpler to carry them home; for the United States, for example, shipping rarely makes sense for bottles under about 30 euros. How many bottles you can bring back in your luggage also depends on your own country’s customs rules, so check them before you fly.
Where to stay, and how to get there
Where you sleep decides what kind of trip this is. Stay in Chalon for the Paulée, the restaurants and the quays on foot. If you would rather not stay in town, Château de Bellecroix in Chagny is a château in its own park, a former house of the Knights of Malta with parts dating from the twelfth century. Sleeping in a house this old is a way into Burgundy’s own history, and Chagny sits where the Côte de Beaune ends and the Côte Chalonnaise begins.
The simplest way in is the train, direct from Paris to Chalon-sur-Saône, or from Lyon. Some of our clients start in Lyon, stay in Chalon, then go on to Beaune or Dijon. If you would rather base yourself in or around Beaune, the Côte Chalonnaise makes a full day trip. A weekend covers the Paulée, Givry and Germolles; add a day for Bouzeron, Rully, Mercurey and Montagny. If you plan to taste properly, take a driver. We arrange them for day trips from wherever you are staying.
The Côte Chalonnaise, briefly
What is a paulée in Burgundy?
The meal that closes the harvest, when pickers and winemakers sit at one table. Meursault’s is the most famous; Chalon’s is a three day public festival in mid October.
Is the Côte Chalonnaise worth visiting?
Yes, if you want Burgundy at village scale: family estates, wines that cost less than the Côte d’Or’s, varied countryside, and history you can still read in the vineyard names.
Do I have to buy wine at a tasting in Burgundy?
No. Most growers are happy to pour for curious visitors without expecting a sale, but if you love something, a bottle or two is a good way to say thank you.
If you are not sure where to start, begin at a village caveau like Caveau Givry Vins, where you can taste many estates side by side with no pressure. Note the wines you love.
And if you find more than you can carry, we help our guests arrange shipping home from the estates and shops we visit together.
Can I ship wine home from Burgundy?
Yes. Estates and wine shops can ship to most countries, and we help our guests arrange it. Whether it is worth it depends on where you live, since shipping costs, duties and taxes vary. For everyday bottles it is often easier to pack them in your luggage, within your country’s customs allowance.
How is climate change affecting Burgundy wine?
Growers now work to keep grapes fresh rather than to get them ripe, and water is the worry. In 2026 the berries were smaller and fewer but highly concentrated, and some slopes that once struggled now ripen easily, so the style of both reds and whites is shifting.
Note: we visited the Paulée from 16 to 18 October 2026 as guests of the Chalon tourist office. Everything here is our own view.
Travel to the Côte Chalonnaise
If you travel to understand a place, this is the kind of trip we design: a day in the vines with a grower, a weekend in Chalon around the Paulée, or a longer route through Burgundy built around the questions you bring, with every visit and table booked.
Sources: conversations with Baptiste Lumpp and other growers in Givry and the Côte Chalonnaise, and with Lionel at Terroirs & Millésimes, October 2026; Office de Tourisme du Grand Chalon; Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne, CEPINNOV, October 2026; Château de Germolles; Musée Nicéphore Niépce; Claude Courtépée, Description générale et particulière du duché de Bourgogne.
