Beaune

Below the streets, the wine is sleeping. Cellars run under the old town in cool darkness, bottles ageing in silence, while above them the roof of the Hospices de Beaune glows in glazed tile — diamonds of green, gold, red and black that catch every shift in the Burgundy sky. Beaune, in France's Burgundy, is a town that revolves around a single obsession, and the obsession is total.

Beaune is Burgundy's wine capital, sitting mid-way along the Côte d'Or where the slope produces the region's most celebrated bottles. The Hôtel-Dieu, the Hospices de Beaune, was founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Duke of Burgundy, as a hospital for the poor, and its courtyard of polychrome roofs became the emblem of the whole region; inside, the long hall of the sick keeps its curtained beds and Rogier van der Weyden's Last Judgement. Every November the Hospices' charity wine auction sets the tone for the vintage and fills the town for a weekend. The wine houses in the centre open their cellars for tastings and oenology classes, and the Route des Grands Crus runs north through Pommard, Volnay and Nuits-Saint-Georges past vineyard plots whose names appear on the most expensive wine lists in the world — flat enough to cycle, with cellar doors in every village.