In 1395, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, outlawed Gamay from his lands, calling it “a very bad and disloyal plant.” I’d like to suggest, with the greatest respect to the Duke, that he got this one wrong. More than six hundred years later, some of Burgundy’s most exciting young winemakers are openly borrowing the methods long associated with their neighbours to the south, while the best Cru Beaujolais still costs around a third less than comparable Burgundy. If you enjoy good wine and would also like to keep a little money in your pocket, I think you’ll want to hear more.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Beaujolais
Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love follows two couples around a bottle of gin as the light fades, each certain of what they mean by love, and each more muddled the longer they talk. I’m reminded of it whenever Beaujolais comes up in conversation, because people rarely mean the same thing by it.
So let me be clear about what I’m talking about. I don’t mean the bottles with “Beaujolais” or “Beaujolais-Villages” on the front, and I certainly don’t mean Beaujolais Nouveau, which turns up every November on the third Thursday with a great deal of fanfare. I mean Cru Beaujolais, the wines from the region’s ten best villages, which carry the village name on the label rather than the word Beaujolais: Brouilly, Chénas, Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Fleurie, Juliénas, Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Régnié and Saint-Amour. If you’ve only ever met the other kinds, I’d ask you to keep an open mind.
Burgundy comes calling
The Duke’s edict did Burgundy’s reputation no harm, but it’s worth knowing that Gamay had grown around Lyon since Roman times, and Philip never bothered to enforce his ban in Beaujolais, where the grape found its true home on granite soils. Banished or not, it seems to have done rather well for itself.
These days, the traffic runs the other way. Young winemakers in the Mâconnais have long rubbed shoulders with their Beaujolais counterparts at natural wine fairs, and the influence now reaches deep into Burgundy itself, with a younger generation experimenting with whole-bunch fermentation and, in some cases, carbonic maceration, techniques that Beaujolais has practised for centuries. Even long-established estates have joined in, with Charles Lachaux at Arnoux-Lachaux now fermenting many of his wines entirely as whole bunches. Having worked and studied around the world, these winemakers seem far less interested in old rivalries than the Duke was.
Beaujolais, in turn, has borrowed a good idea from Burgundy, focusing more on single-plot wines, as Barolo and Champagne have done before it. The standard-bearer here is the Côte du Py in Morgon, a hill whose name carries real weight with anyone who loves these wines.
The catch, and the good news
The best Cru Beaujolais isn’t always easy to find. A few years ago, I’d take the Eurostar to Paris just to get my fix, as the natural wine bars there treated the top growers like rock stars. They’re better known in Britain now, and a handful of independent shops stock them, but the most celebrated names, including the so-called Gang of Four of Lapierre, Foillard, Thévenet and Breton, along with Métras, make very little wine, and France tends to drink most of it.
The good news is the price. I’m delighted to see Burgundy borrowing from Beaujolais, but I hope one Burgundian habit never makes the journey south, and that’s the relentless climb in prices.
What protects Cru Beaujolais, I think, is the attitude of the people who make it. Even the finest growers make wines to be opened and enjoyed, although the best can age for many years, and the region has so far escaped the kind of fine wine worship that turns bottles into trophies.
The rest of Beaujolais has its own challenges, having long been tied to the image of Nouveau, cheap and cheerful and, it must be said, an important source of income for many growers. The region has looked at other routes, including sparkling wine, to help move beyond that reputation, and I wish it well.
Final thoughts
So when I talk about Beaujolais, this is what I mean: wines of real finesse from named villages and single plots, made by people who would rather you drank them than collected them, at prices that still make sense. The Duke may have had the last word in 1395, but I suspect Gamay is having the last laugh, and I’d encourage you to open a bottle and join in 🙂
A note on the 2014 vintage: When I first wrote this post in 2015, I had just tasted the 2014 Cru Beaujolais in London with Jean Bourjade of Inter-Beaujolais. It was a cooler year that ended with an Indian summer, producing aromatic wines with silky tannins and fine structure, closer in style to Burgundy than to the Rhône.
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