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ROTTER’S SHORT

GUIDE TO

Noble Rot 5756 Noble Rot

NOSLEEP

TILLBOJO

No one in Beaujolais needs an excuse to enjoy life, but the area’s recent renaissance

is a special cause for celebration

Words by Dan Keeling | Illustrations by Mike Reddy Photos by Juan Trujillo Andrades

What does a wine region need to be taken seriously? Discernible vintage and terroir variations? World-class winemaking? Demand far outstripping supply? Although Beaujolais was once notorious for producing oceans of generic plonk, today’s best bottles have all the credentials to be considered ‘fine’ wines. Join Noble Rot over the next few pages for our guide to the people and places that are getting us most excited...

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caresses the senses with a mix of peonies, cherries, strawberries and earth – it doesn’t smell of Gamay so much as a summer walk in the country. Some drinkers may lambast Beaujolais wine for lacking the complexity of neighbouring Burgundy, but that’s like pitting the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter against Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Sunier’s Fleurie may hit fewer notes than a Romanée-Conti, but the ones it does it hits with irresistible joie de vivre.

Beaujolais – or to be specific, the small percentage of wine produced by the best domaines within the 10 designated Cru appellations (Morgan, Fleurie, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Juliénas, Chiroubles, Régnié, Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly and Saint–Amour) – is a world away from the synthetic banana and bubblegum flavoured Beaujolais Nouveau that made the region famous in the 1970s. Today, its renaissance as a place capable of ‘serious’ wines is fully complete due to a handful of vignerons who took inspiration from the late Jules Chauvet, a négociant and chemist who was considered the best taster of his generation and the father of ‘natural’ wine. Christened the ‘Gang of Four’ by American importer Kermit Lynch, a group of winemakers led by Marcel Lapierre including Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet and Guy Breton first began experiments based on Chauvet’s teachings around 1978. Eschewing the common

local use of fertilisers, chaptalisation and cultivated yeasts, the ‘Gang of Four’ started working with organic viticulture, no/low sulphur and natural yeasts to make their wines. “Jules Chauvet was a brilliant taster who still had memories of what the old wines of Beaujolais used to be like,” explains Jean-Paul Thévenet as we drink Morgon with his son Charly, overlooking the vines.

(Above) Jean-Paul & Charly Thévenet, Morgon, 12th July 2016

Deep in the Beaujolais countryside nobody can hear you scream. “Guests have asked if they can stay after the party but I told them, ‘You’re not going to sleep,’” laughs Julien Sunier about his impending birthday celebrations. “I told them, ‘You can bring a sleeping bag but you’ll leave it in the car.’” He grins like Gaul’s answer to the Cheshire Cat and begins rifling through a kitchen drawer for a corkscrew. An hour’s drive on the autoroute north of Lyon, it’s taken Noble Rot the same time to navigate Beaujolais’ twisting hillsides, delayed by leisurely tractors and dirt-track wrong turns to

Sunier’s isolated Avenas home. Now the thought of finding our way back to civilisation from a raucous symposium of local vignerons – embittered by the recent hail storms that have decimated this year’s crop – is making us sweat. Sure, Noble Rot can party with the best of them but this sounds like it could be a little…intense.

“Man, after all the crazy weather my winemaker friends are due a drink,” laments Sunier as he pulls corks from bottles of his 2015 Beaujolais Crus – Fleurie, Morgon and Régnié. In the corner of his open plan kitchen sit two large speaker

cabinets, record decks and a box of vinyl with an earmarked copy of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed awaiting deployment. “I like to make Gamay with freshness,” Sunier says in his oscillating Burgundian tones, pouring the previous year’s ripe, healthy wines. “Many people saw the potential of 2015 when they harvested, and said, ‘We’re going to make a big wine with this’. I did the opposite. I don’t want to make big wines because for me a good wine is an empty bottle.” We swirl the glasses of dark ruby Fleurie to release the aromas and take long sniffs, then slurps. Its delicate perfume

“I don’t want to make big wines because for me

a good wine is an empty bottle.”

Julien Sunier

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Some drinkers may lambast Beaujolais wine for lacking the complexity of neighbouring Burgundy,

but that’s like pitting the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter against Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

‘La Madone’ (The Madonna) vineyard, Fleurie

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Granitic rock (including sections of sand and clay) dominates the soil composition of the ten Beaujolais Crus, which are in turn divided into single vineyard lieux dits. From renowned Fleurie climats like ‘La Madone’ (The Madonna), ‘Grille-Midi’ and ‘Clos de la Grand’Cour’ to Morgon’s famous ‘Côte du Py’ (where roches pourries, AKA ‘rotten rocks’ litter the

ground), there is great opportunity here for winemakers to express terroir like their northerly Côte d’Or compatriots, if only they respect the land. “You only recognise terroir when you drink wine that is fermented with yeast from the actual place, and the land is worked properly by plough,” explains Julien Sunier. “If you make wine from a completely fucked-up

herbicide parcel with yeast control and thermovinification – which is a big problem here – then you can’t talk about terroir. When I go to some of my friends’ houses who make the wines this way, you don’t see a difference between the Crus. You drink the wine and it all tastes the same.” Of all appellations, Fleurie and Morgon feature the largest number of quality producers making what can be

“Jules Chavet was a brilliant taster who still had memories of what the old wines

of Beaujolais used to be like. He said ‘Why can’t we make wines like that?”

Jean-Paul Thévenet

“Chauvet said ‘Why can’t we make wines like that?’ People had forgotten a time before fertilisers, but he had done a lot of research and knew how to work the soil. He explained carbonic maceration and codified techniques that generations of vignerons had been doing by feel.” Instead of the heavy, manipulated juice pumped out by the large industrial wineries in the region, the friends made

bottles for their own drinking pleasure – light, perfumed, lower alcohol wines where fizz or cloudiness was accepted as part of ‘living’ wine rather than defects to be stripped away. “When we all started it was a very exciting time,” agrees Jean Foillard, whose own first vintage came in 1980. “We were all exchanging ideas and techniques – it really moved things forward.”

Marcel Lapierre passed away in 2010 but still inspires saint-like reverence among his legions of fans. On our recent trip, Noble Rot met a foreign wine merchant who was searching for directions to Marcel’s grave: later that day the man was spotted in deep contemplation next to the headstone with a bottle of one of Lapierre’s old vintages on the go. Luckily for wine lovers, the family domaine is still going strong, run by Marcel’s son Mathieu, 34, and daughter Camille, 30. With their frizzy locks and laid-back attitude, the siblings look more like bohemian surfers than landlocked farmers, producing three gorgeous cuvées from 16ha of vineyards they own around Morgon. Aside from the ‘Vielles Vignes’ (old vines) and fruit-focused ‘Cuvée Marcel Lapierre’, Noble Rot adores the structured, mineral ‘Cuvée Camille’ (average annual production 3,000 bottles). Made from a section of vineyard with pure granitic soil, the 2014 is a harmonious wine with a mouthwatering salinity which keeps the drinker returning for more.

(Above) Mathieu and Camille Lapierre, Morgon, 12th July 2016

(Right) Côte du Py vineyard, Morgon

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“There is less money here than other wine regions so life is more simple.

This is a bottle of wine, man – keep cool!”

Julien Sunier

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considered authentically made ‘natural’ wines, whilst others like Valentine’s day favourite Saint-Amour has only Château des Rontets making wines without herbicide and synthetic yeasts. Morgon, like nearby Moulin-à-Vent, is famed for producing darker, more austere, long-lived wines that – like the sublime bottles of Jean Foillard’s 2006 Morgon ‘Côte du Py’ and Yvon Métras’ 2010 Moulin-à-Vent we are lucky enough to enjoy – gain stylistic similarities with Pinot Noir as they age. Whether the Crus have perceptible differences is obviously affected by variations in the winemaking, but as a rule of thumb the hotter vintages can lack some

(Previous spread) Winery details at Clos de la Roilette (left) and Domaine Julie Balagny.

(Left) Jean & Agnès Foillard at home, Morgon, 12th July 2016.

of the terroir definition of the cooler years.

“For me, there is something in the soil in Moulin-à-Vent that’s a bit more complex than Morgon,” says Julie Balagny amid a cacophony of quacking ducks at her winery. Having first left her native Paris to take a job as a winemaker in the South of France, Balagny arrived in Beaujolais in 2009 after the highly regarded producer Yvon Métras helped find the first parcels of vines she bought in 2014 (she had simultaneously been looking in the Jura via Jean François Ganevat, but the opportunity to buy land in Fleurie came first). From a basic, almost medieval cellar Balagny makes a tiny annual

(Above) Foillard ‘Côte du Py’ 2006

(Right) Julie Balagny and friend, Moulin-á-Vent, 13th July 2016

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1947,” Jean-Louis tells Noble Rot as we drive down the dirt track that bisects his recently decimated Clos de la Grand’Cour (a monopole vineyard up until he swapped a parcel of vines with Coudert). He brings his dusty Citroen to a halt next to the 1.4ha he owns of ‘Champagne’ – an unremarkable, south-westerly sloping patch of land – and the difference between his well-worked pink granite and the neighbour’s drab non-organic vines is immediately obvious. “We lost everything in ‘Clos de la Grand’Cour’ this year and a lot here in ‘Champagne’, but at least I’ve been able to buy grapes so we can make some wine,” says Jean-Louis, ruefully inspecting the

damaged vines. With hailstones as large as golf balls destroying 100% of vines in Chirobles, 60% in Fleurie and 33% in Morgon, 2016 has been horrendous for Beaujolais, not that the locals will let it get them down. Especially if Julien Sunier’s ‘up-all-night-crew’ are anything to do with it. “The atmosphere here in Beaujolais is welcoming,” says Julien, finishing his glass of Fleurie and wiping a hand across his infectious smile. “There is less money here than other wine regions so life is more simple. This is a bottle of wine, man – keep cool!” Laughter, friendship, great food and wine: like Beaujolais, the best things in life are so uncomplicated.

(Above) At the court of King Jean-Louis Dutraive, Domaine de la Grand’Cour, 13th July 2016 (Left to right: Mark Andrew, Dan Keeling, Jean-Louis Dutraive)

production of around 7,000 bottles, with her brooding Moulin-à-Vent marking her out – like fellow newcomers Andrew Nielsen at Le Grappin and Clotaire Michal – as one of the most exciting up-and-coming names to watch. However, if Noble Rot had to pick one producer whose wines have already arrived at the apogée of what Gamay can achieve, it would be Jean-Louis Dutraive at the magnificently titled Domaine de la Grand’Cour.

Judging by the surround-ings you wouldn’t guess Domaine de la Grand’Cour produces Beaujolais’ finest wine. Decrepit machinery, random piles of sand and a large constructor’s crane

stand next to ramshackle outbuildings, whilst inside the winery a precariously bowing ceiling is held together by makeshift wooden beams. The whole place feels like a 1980’s government public service advert illustrating the hidden dangers of accidental death on a farm. However, from among such questionable environs the humble Jean-Louis Dutraive fashions a Brouilly and three Fleurie cuvées headed by the intense and ethereal ‘Champagne’ – a remarkable wine that has the balance, poise and texture to stake a claim among France’s finest. A recently opened 2005 was quite simply the most brilliant Beaujolais

Noble Rot has ever drunk. Dating back to 1890,

Domaine de la Grand’Cour was originally half of a larger estate split in two when previous owner Pierre Crozet sold to Jean-Louis’ grandfather in 1969. The other half became Clos de la Roilette – owned today by Dutraive’s friend Alain Coudert – which produces another Beaujolais stand out, the liquid silk ‘Griffe du Marquis’. Like Dutraive’s ‘Champagne’, this wine has a weight coupled with lightness of touch that wouldn’t be out of place in Chambolle–Musigny. “I’ve never seen a balance between richness and acidity like we have in 2015 – my father compares it to

NOBLE ROT RECOMMENDS/ OUR FAVOURITE RECENT BOTTLES

1. 2005 Domaine de la Grand’Cour – Fleurie ‘Champagne’

2. 2015 Julien Sunier – Fleurie3. 2014 M. & C. Lapierre – Morgon ‘Cuvée

Camille’4. 2014 Clos de la Roilette – Fleurie ‘Griffe du

Marquis’ 5. 2010 Yvon Métras – Moulin-à-Vent 6. 2015 Le Grappin – Fleurie ‘Poncié’7. 2015 Julie Balagny – Moulin-à-Vent

‘Mamouth’8. 2006 Jean Foillard - Morgon ‘Côte du Py’9. 2015 Jean-Paul Thévenet – Morgon ‘Vielles

Vignes’10. 2015 Charly Thévenet – Régnié

Wines and prices can be found onwww.winesearcher.com