Beaune

Beaune takes its name from Belena, the Latinised Gaulish name of a spring around which the first settlement grew, itself linked to Belenos, a god of fast-flowing water. The Romans built a fort here in the first century AD, and the vine was already making the area prosperous by the 13th century. In 1203 a charter granted the commune its rights and privileges, and the town became closely tied to the Dukes of Burgundy, whose castle and walls guarded it.

Its most famous building came from the ducal court. In 1443 Nicolas Rolin, chancellor of the Duke of Burgundy, and his wife Guigone de Salins founded the Hôtel-Dieu as a hospital for the poor, commissioning the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden to paint a Last Judgement for it. Donations gave the Hospices vineyards of their own, and the sale of their wine paid for the charity's work. The town walls were last modernised in 1636 with bastions on their weakest sides. The Great Winter of 1709 destroyed crops across the area, and Beaune stockpiled grain while nearby villages rioted against requisitions.

The Hospices' wine auction, first held in the 19th century, gained a world reputation from 1924, and a school of viticulture opened in 1884. At the end of the First World War the American army ran a university for its soldiers in the town. In 2015 Beaune was included in the UNESCO listing of the Climats of Burgundy.

Wine is the town's culture. Beaune has no grand cru vineyard of its own, but many of Burgundy's major négociants are based here, along with wine-industry suppliers, institutes and schools, and the cellars of producers large and small lie beneath the old streets. The year turns on the vineyard calendar and culminates in November, when the Hospices auction draws buyers and visitors from around the world as part of the Trois Glorieuses, created in 1934 by the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin.

The town's heritage is shown off in its glazed patterned roofs — Beaune is the main centre of this Burgundian tile style — and in the Hôtel-Dieu; the town attracts around 400,000 visitors a year. Étienne-Jules Marey, a pioneer of chronophotography and an influential figure in the history of cinema, was born here. The mathematician Gaspard Monge, inventor of descriptive geometry, was another native.

Local manners are those of a small, prosperous provincial town used to visitors: greetings are expected in every shop and cellar, tastings are taken seriously, and the Saturday market is as much a social event as a shopping trip.

About 20,000 people lived in Beaune in 2023, making it the second town of the Côte-d'Or, and about 50,600 in the wider Beaune Côte et Sud area in 2022. The population has been falling slightly. Beaune is a sub-prefecture, and its economy rests on wine — production, trade, equipment and services — and on tourism, alongside the shops and services of a market town.

Behind the image of wealth, most residents are workers or office and shop employees, incomes are modest, and around a fifth of homes are social housing. Short-term holiday lets have become a local issue, as owners of flats in the centre rent to visitors rather than to year-round residents. The boulevard around the ramparts has been rebuilt with fewer traffic lanes to calm the centre.

The weekly rhythm is set by the Saturday-morning market and the year by the vineyards, from pruning in winter to the harvest in early autumn, when seasonal workers and visitors fill the town.

Beaune eats and drinks Burgundy. Restaurants serve the region's classics: bœuf bourguignon, beef braised in red wine; œufs en meurette, eggs in a red-wine sauce; escargots, snails baked in their shells with parsley butter; jambon persillé, a marbled ham with parsley; and gougères, savoury choux pastries made with cheese. Époisses, a pungent washed-rind cow's-milk cheese, also appears on local cheese boards.

The Saturday-morning market at the covered halles opposite the Hôtel-Dieu is the town's larder, with a wide variety of food. Mustard is made here too: the Fallot family has produced it in Beaune since 1840, with around thirty varieties, some of them flavoured.

Wine is the centre of everything. The Côte de Beaune around the town produces red Pinot Noir and white Chardonnay, and some of the world's most famous wine villages, such as Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet, lie just to the south; and the Route des Grands Crus runs north through Nuits-Saint-Georges to Gevrey-Chambertin. Many houses in town offer tastings in their cellars, and kir, white wine with blackcurrant liqueur, is a classic aperitif.