I'm Levy Dalton, and this is all drink to that, where we get behind the scenes of the wine business.

When it comes to Burgundy Cruz, something that you will hear Vignoran say is that one area of Volney differs from another area of Volney.

Or sometimes they say this about Vaughn, or Shambol, or Mori Santani. It is said about a lot of different particular villages.

There is the idea that the character of the Cruz in one part of a particular village is different from those found in other parts of that same village.

This is one reason why you hear Vignoran talking about blending together the wine of several different Cruz, situated within a single village, to achieve a true sense of Vallage character in the wine from that village.

Benjamin LaRoum mentions doing this for his Vallage wine in his interview, for instance.

But actually, when you think about it, it can seem a bit odd that two Cruz from the same village would give a very different character from one another, and that a third true in that same village might be entirely different from the first two.

It can seem odd because the village names are what are used to indicate the areas on many Burgundy maps and many Burgundy labels.

And we think of Volney as a unit containing Cruz that have a character that is Volney-like.

But the question is, should we perceive it that way? Should the village names be the distinguishing feature in how we understand Burgundy?

François Vagnier, a geologist who has been studying the Cruz of Burgundy for two decades now, has some answers to these questions, and she is the guest on today's program.

To better follow along with what François says, a map of Burgundy, a standard village-centered map of Burgundy, may be a helpful thing to have in front of you.

And before we get to her interview, we should recall how the geology of France came to be and how the code door, as we know it, was formed.

Geologist Brenna Quigley explained that process in episode 463 of All Drink To That.

So the history of the geology of France starts over 300 million years ago.

Most people know that Pangia was a supercontinent that existed in the past.

But what a lot of people don't know is that there are actually several different supercontinents in the history of the Earth.

So Pangia was just the most recent.

And that makes sense if you think about, you know, continents are basically moving around a sphere.

So if they continue moving for billions of years, they're going to crash into each other, and then eventually they're going to start moving apart, and then they'll crash into each other again.

So basically, the oldest rocks in France, the Messief Central and the Messief Amoracan, are ancient, ancient mountain ranges that were formed by the assembly of Pangia.

So before Pangia existed as a supercontinent, it was separate continents that all kind of came together during these relatively dramatic continental collisions and formed these really ancient mountain ranges.

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