Stand halfway up a slope in the Côte de Nuits and much of Burgundy’s argument begins to make sense.

Below, the land flattens. Soils tend to deepen. Water and cold air behave differently. Climb towards the middle of the slope and things change: thinner soils, limestone closer to the surface, better drainage, different exposure to the sun.

Somewhere in those apparently modest differences lies a rather immodest difference in price.

The grape may be the same. The grower may be the same. The vineyards can be separated by little more than a road — yet one bottle carries a village name and another the name of a grand cru.

This is the territory terroir is attempting to describe.

Soil, slope, aspect, drainage, altitude, climate. The movement of cold air before dawn. And, crucially, generations of people noticing that one patch of earth behaved differently from the patch beside it.

Terroir is sometimes spoken about as though Burgundy invented a particularly sophisticated branch of mysticism.

Much of it is considerably less supernatural: geography, observation and a few centuries of taking very detailed notes.

The mystery is not that place matters.

It is how much.

To understand a bottle, begin with where it stood.