Burgundy is an actual colour named after a certain type of wine, it's also not entirely coincidentally the name of one of the better known wine regions in France.
What is more difficult to fathom, perhaps even confusing for the wine luddites in our number among whose ranks I presume myself to be preeminent, is that not all wine produced in the region is in fact burgundy. I would hazard a guess from what I've seen today that most in reality is not.
Even more confusing perhaps is that grapes grown in Burgundy, are actually produced in a region known as Côte d'Or which when translated into English means more or less , "Slopes of Gold".
This name has nought to do with mineral wealth apparently and every thing to do with the appearance of the vineyards in autumn when slopes are cloaked in a golden curtain of leaves about to fall. Today though, the colour was anything but gold as the reflections from the brand new wire trellises made them look for all the world as though they'd been draped in gossamer by some giant creature, and the steeper slopes, well let's just say that gold is not a colour that comes to mind when viewing them from any distance.
For those among us who may think the origin of the name is a little inconsistent there is an alternative theory:
The wine industry is quite heavily regulated, to the extent that on these slopes, production is limited to one bottle of wine per vine. At a price typically ranging from thirty to fifty Euros per bottle for product grown here, often more, if one were to multiply this selling price by the number of vines, a certain logic appears in the taxonomy.
Somewhere between Beaune and Dijon
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It looks to my jaded eye like lowlying land which has been flooded. It has been a long, taxing summer.
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