Bordeaux vs Burgundy: what is the difference?

At a glance

Bordeaux ranks the name, Burgundy the soil

The Classification of 1855 (opens in a new tab) ranks names, not soil: it was drawn from brokers’ sale records, and the rank follows the name the trade priced. Benjamin Lewin, a Master of Wine, puts it in one line: Bordeaux has been classified by price, Burgundy by terroir (the land itself).

Burgundy ranks the land in 4 steps: regional wines such as Bourgogne at the base, then village wines, then premier cru, then grand cru. The region has 84 appellations, 33 of them Grands Crus. Grand Cru means something else again in Saint-Émilion (opens in a new tab), where it is an appellation.

A Burgundy grower divides the harvest by the rank of each parcel, and the same vineyard name can appear on the labels of different producers. So on a Burgundy label the name that tells you the most is the vineyard’s. On a Bordeaux label it is the château’s.

A red blend against a white single grape

A red Bordeaux is a blend as a rule. The appellation admits 6 red grapes, and 3 of them do nearly all the work: Merlot is 66% of the red vineyard, Cabernet Sauvignon 22.5%, and Cabernet Franc 9.5%. The whites are Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon, with Muscadelle (opens in a new tab) behind them. Bordeaux is a red region: red and rosé were 83% of the volume of the 2024 harvest in the Gironde, more than 4 bottles in 5.

Burgundy reverses that picture. Nearly 6 vines in 10 are Chardonnay and about 1 in 3 is Pinot Noir, with Aligoté, Gamay, and Sauvignon sharing the rest. Six bottles in 10 are white. The first difference is the simplest one: a bottle of Bordeaux is most likely a red blend, and a bottle of Burgundy most likely a white from a single grape.

Three hectares for every one

Bordeaux had 100,737 hectares of vines in production in 2024, 95,000 of them under an appellation. Burgundy has 32,301. The BIVB's count includes Chablis and the Grand Auxerrois, a fifth of the area, and stops at the Mâconnais: Beaujolais is not in it. That is roughly 3 hectares of Bordeaux for every hectare of Burgundy.

In volume the gap is narrower. Bordeaux harvested 3.65 million hectoliters in 2024, and Burgundy makes about 1.49 million in an average year: about 2 bottles of Burgundy for every 5 of Bordeaux.

A shape you can tell across the room

The glasses follow the wines. A Bordeaux glass is tall, with a large bowl that tapers slightly at the top, made for Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and their blends. A Burgundy glass is shorter and much wider, a balloon of a bowl with a tapered rim, made to give a more delicate wine like Pinot Noir plenty of air.

The bottles tell them apart before the cork comes out. The Bordeaux bottle has straight sides and high shoulders; the Burgundy bottle is slightly fatter, with sloping shoulders. Both shapes became standard in the 19th century, and nobody is certain why they differ. One theory holds that Bordeaux wanted a pronounced shoulder to catch sediment as the wine is poured; another, that glassblowers simply found the Burgundy shape easier to make.