July 05, 2024
What Julien Bernard lost in time by stopping to greet his friends and family in the Burgundy time trial, he gained in making the Tour a celebration of cycling fandom
Terroir is the word French winemakers use to describe the environmental factors that make each appellation, each vineyard even, unique and special. Terroir is soil composition, weather, topography, context, grape variety, farming practices, geology, orientation and more; or rather it’s the combination of all these things, and relates to how each affects the other. The point is that terroir is more than the sum of its parts. Wines are complex, because terroir is complex.
They know a thing or two about terroir in the corner of France in which the seventh stage of the 2024 Tour de France took place. The start and finish towns of Nuits-Saint-Georges and Gevrey-Chambertin sit atop the Côte de Nuits, a chalky limestone ridge stretching north and south through Burgundy all the way to Dijon. The terroir here – chalky limestone on a sandy gravel base, highly varied soil composition, cold winters and hot summers and east and southeast-facing vineyards – brings out the best in the delicate pinot noir grape, from which the best red burgundies are made, and in the dozen or so kilometres that separate Nuits-Saint-Georges and Gevrey-Chambertin there are six Grands Crus produced alone.
Julien Bernard rides the Burgundy time trial (Getty Images)
This region is also part of the terroir of Julien Bernard, the Lidl-Trek domestique and silver medallist in the recent French national road race championships who is participating in his fourth Tour de France this year. Bernard’s terroir is a complex but heady mix: he is the son of Jean-François Bernard, who was third in the 1987 Tour, and while he was born in Nevers, he raced in nearby Dijon as a junior and lives there now. He was the local boy in stage seven, le régional.
Before today, Bernard was probably best known for being a dependable team rider, nine years on the same team so far. Nerds might be able to recall his single victory as a pro – stage three of the Tour des Alpes Maritimes et du Var in 2020 – and cycling fans of a certain vintage go a little misty-eyed at the physical resemblance he bears to his father. (That physical resemblance is possibly where it ends – Jean-François was mercurial, moody and temperamental as a rider in a way that Julien is…