When Charlemagne rebuilt learning, law and order across his empire around the year 800, he did not forget the vine. Under the Carolingian revival, viticulture was tidied, regulated and pushed north, monastic estates began the patient work of mapping which slopes made the best wine, and a body of royal law even set down how wine should be made and stored. One Burgundian hill still bears the emperor’s name — Corton-Charlemagne — wrapped in a legend about a stained white beard. The history behind it is even better than the legend. (Part of the great turning points in wine history.)
Quick facts
- Charlemagne’s reign (768–814) drove a broad revival of ordered viticulture.
- His estate law, the Capitulare de villis, set rules for vineyards and clean wine-presses.
- He gave the hill of Corton to an abbey in 775; the grand cru still bears his name.
The emperor and the vine
Charlemagne, King of the Franks and, from Christmas Day 800, the first Holy Roman Emperor, ruled a realm stretching from the Pyrenees deep into central Europe. His court sponsored the revival of scholarship, administration and craft now called the Carolingian Renaissance — and wine, central both to the Church’s liturgy and to the noble table, was part of the order he set out to impose1.
The Capitulare de villis: rules for the royal vineyards
Charlemagne governed his sprawling royal estates through a remarkable ordinance, the Capitulare de villis — seventy chapters covering everything from justice to the care of hounds. And it took wine seriously2.
An entire chapter is devoted to it, and others return to the theme, insisting above all on cleanliness in the winery. For a document about running farms, its concern with how wine should be pressed, stored and accounted for is striking — one of the earliest attempts anywhere to regulate wine quality and hygiene by law3.
| What it covered | Charlemagne’s instruction |
|---|---|
| Wine (chapter 8) | Care of the vineyards, and the making, storing and shipping of the estate’s wine |
| The presses (chapters 41 & 48) | Wine-presses to be kept scrupulously clean and in good order |
| Storage | Wine kept carefully, in sound vessels |
| Accountability | Stewards to record and account for every estate’s wine |
A temperate emperor
For a ruler so bound up with wine, Charlemagne was strikingly abstemious himself. His friend and courtier Einhard, who knew him well, left an intimate portrait modelled on the Roman biographer Suetonius — and was blunt about the emperor’s habits at table4.
He was temperate in eating, and particularly so in drinking, for he abominated drunkenness in anybody … he rarely allowed himself more than three cups in the course of a meal.— Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne (c. 830)4
The man who ordered clean presses and well-kept cellars, in other words, drank with the same discipline he demanded of his estates.
The Carolingian revival of viticulture
Peace and imperial patronage let viticulture spread and stabilise, above all on Church land. Monasteries, richly endowed by Charlemagne and his heirs, became the great vineyard-keepers of the age5.
Their monks did more than tend vines — they observed and recorded, noting which parcels ripened best and made the finest wine. That patient, generations-long mapping of the land was the seed of the Burgundian idea of the climat, the notion that a single named slope can make a distinct wine. Under the Carolingians the vine also pushed firmly into the valleys of the Rhine and Moselle, laying foundations that still shape German and French wine today6. (More on this in a Rhine and Moselle wine cruise.)
The legend of Corton-Charlemagne
The most charming story attaches to the hill of Corton, in Burgundy. It is not pure invention: in 775 Charlemagne gave most of the hill to the Abbey of Saint-Andoche at Saulieu, and legend adds that he told the monks to watch where the winter snow melted first — the warmest, best-exposed ground — and plant vines there7.
The famous part is almost certainly a later tale: that the aging emperor’s white beard showed every drop of spilled red wine, so his wife begged him to switch to white, and white grapes were planted on his slopes to oblige. It is a lovely story with two problems — there is no contemporary evidence for it, and historians are near-unanimous that Charlemagne, despite the “flowering beard” of the medieval epics, probably wore no beard at all. What is true is that his name has clung to the hill for twelve centuries8.
White wine and the emperor’s hill
Whatever the truth of the beard, the slopes of Corton genuinely do excel at white wine: the pale, limestone-rich upper soils suit Chardonnay superbly. Today Corton-Charlemagne is one of the world’s greatest white wines, a Burgundy grand cru producing around 300,000 bottles a year — and the only great wine to carry the name of the emperor who once owned the ground it grows on9.
Crowned on Christmas Day
On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, reviving the imperial title in the West and binding his realm ever more closely to the Church. That union of empire and Church mattered for wine: it was the Church’s endless need for sacramental wine, backed by imperial order and endowment, that carried viticulture safely through the centuries after Rome’s fall10.
Charlemagne’s vinous legacy
Charlemagne died in 814, but the framework he strengthened outlasted him by a thousand years. The monastic mapping of Burgundy’s slopes, the northward reach of the vine into the Rhine and Moselle, and the very idea that wine deserved careful law and clean cellars all trace back to his revival. Few rulers have left so deep a mark on the vineyard — and only one has a grand cru named for him11.
Frequently asked questions
More from this day in wine history
See everything else that happened on December 25 — who was born, what was bottled, and which laws were signed.
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References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Charlemagne. www.britannica.com ↩
- wein.plus Lexicon — Capitulare de villis vel curtis imperii Caroli Magni. glossary.wein.plus ↩
- Academia.edu — Capitulare de villis and the Bible: On the Economic Programme of Charlemagne. www.academia.edu ↩
- Einhard — The Life of Charlemagne (c. 830), Fordham Medieval Sourcebook. resources.saylor.org ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Benedictine. www.britannica.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Carolingian dynasty. www.britannica.com ↩
- Bourgogne Wines (BIVB) — Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru. www.bourgogne-wines.com ↩
- FINE+RARE — Exploring Corton-Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Corton Blanc. www.frw.co.uk ↩
- The Oxford Companion to Wine — Charlemagne. app.ckbk.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Holy Roman Empire. www.britannica.com ↩
- World History Encyclopedia — Charlemagne. www.worldhistory.org ↩
Recommended reading
Hugh Johnson
Vivid on the medieval Church, the Carolingians and the making of Burgundy.
Rod Phillips
Clear on how monastic and imperial estates shaped European viticulture.
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