n.d.p. in beaujolais: sebastien congretel, régnié-durette

The Beaujolais is barren for good restaurants, and the village of Régnié-Durette is no exception. Any business in Régnié-Durette has the added disadvantage of being secluded: the village proper, unlike nearby towns of Cercié and Villié-Morgon, is set back from the departmental roads. To explore Régnié-Durette usually means going out of one's way.

On drive from his newly restored home in the village to the cuvage he borrows from his father-in-law in Lantignié, I ask newly-installed vigneron Sebastien Congretel how the local Régnié restaurant is. He laughs. "They serve food," he says, in the manner of one awarding the highest possible praise.

Clean-cut, bespectacled, lightly jock-ish, Congretel wouldn't be picked out of a line-up as a vigneron. He formerly lived in the 11ème arrondissement of Paris, and had begun a career working on oil rigs before deciding, in 2015, to become a vigneron in the Beaujolais, where his wife Charlotte's family maintain a handsome estate in Lantignié. Her father lent him the use of a cuvage and equipment, and he was able to acquired parcels in Morgon and Régnié. In another stroke of luck, he fell in with two more senior Beaujolais immigrants, the brothers Julien and Antoine Sunier, who make formidable natural wine in Avenas and Régnié, respectively. This year sees the release of what Congretel considers his proper debut vintage - and the Morgon, in particular, implies he's a very quick study.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: gilles paris, chiroubles

I harvested a few days with Chiroubles-based natural winemaker Gilles Paris back in 2015. It was a disorienting experience. It was the hottest weekend of a heat-wave year, which did no favors for the ambience inside Paris' windowless white transport vans. I also could rarely discern whose vines we were in. In each new parcel I'd ask, "Are these your vines?" and Paris, shaking his head, would inform me they were those of a neighbor who sold to the cave cooperative, or that they belonged instead to his brother Jérôme, who was absent. Paris, it seemed, led a team he rented out to other growers before harvesting his own parcels. In the end I had to depart before setting foot in Paris' vines.

Over dinner during harvest, and throughout innumerable apéro-hours after, I pestered Paris for a tasting at his cuvage. He kept demurring, citing his workload as then-President of the Beaujolais Interprofession. The fact that he and I continually ran into each other while out drinking proved this to be a rather thin excuse. We grew friendly, even as I withheld forming an opinion on his wines, for simple lack of information on them.

It was only over two years later, touring Paris' new winery in Fleurie this past February, that I finally confirmed where he'd been vinifying, and where Jérome Paris had been all this time. That the details of Paris' unfiltered, low-sulfur cru Beaujolais wines had become mysterious was, of course, entirely inadvertent. In Paris' mind, he's just being a normal Beaujolais débrouillard, an effective operator, keeping his head down till the work is done.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: nicolas dubost, saint-germain-sur-l'arbesle

"It's crazy, how many young winemakers are setting up in Beaujolais," muses southern Beaujolais winemaker Nicolas Dubost, who attained biodynamic certification for his organic domaine in 2015. "But not so much in the south."

Dubost is based in Saint-Germain-sur-l'Arbresle, a hamlet beside the village of Bully in the Pierre Dorées. The general viticultural approach here - industrial, productivist, machine-oriented - does a disservice to the diversity of the largely unknown terroir. The handful of ambitious, quality-oriented winemakers - Dobost included - sell their wines at prices so low as to practically discourage critical reflection.

Indeed, if the details of Beaujolais wine production overall remain under-appreciated, even by wine professionals, it's probably because the stakes are so small. There are strong incentives to master, say, Barbaresco vintages or vineyard exposition in Côte Rôtie, since the clients for these high-value wines tend to pose questions and seek assurance of expertise. Folks buying in the 9-14€ range need less convincing, so most retailers, not to mention critics, are content to leave it at 'sweet juice,' 'glouglou,' or a similar substitute for actual qualitative description. It's a shame, because as Dubost's wines increasingly prove, there are troves of nuance to be discovered, even in such unheralded terroir, at such small stakes.

yann bertrand's 1st beaujolais nouveau: "ptit bouchon"

Yann Bertrand with his demi-muid's of Beaujolais primeur

Fleurie's Yann Bertrand made a Beaujolais Nouveau this year from fruit purchased from Charentay vigneron Romain Jambon. It's stellar - a long, 16-day maceration yielded a sinuous, impossibly bright wine, with vigorous raspberry fruit. The quantity is minuscule, something like 2600 bottles. 

What makes the wine groundbreaking is Bertrand's decision not to filter it. He rightly figured that, given the tiny production, his primeur would be drunk in Fleurie, in Lyon, and at furthest, Paris. Little would be risked by avoiding filtration. For good measure, he took the unusual step putting the primeur in demi-muid for two weeks before bottling, so that the wine could clarify itself more quickly than it would have in tank. 

Almost no one releases unfiltered Beaujolais Nouveau. Off the top of my head, I can think of only Max Breton* and Romain des Grottes**, both of whose unfiltered primeurs are, incidentally, terrific. (Oh! And Marcel Joubert.)

n.d.p. in beaujolais: sylvère trichard & elodie bouvard (séléné), blacé

I first heard of Blacé-based Beaujolais vigneron Sylvère Trichard while putting together Paris By Mouth's annual "Beaujolais Nouveau in Paris" round-up a few years ago. I remember being surprised that an unknown vigneron had - all of a sudden, it seemed - placed his primeur alongside those of the region's great winemakers at many of Paris' best Beaujolais bistrots.

It took me a while to connect his name with his wine labels, which bear the domaine name Séléné. I learned only much later that Séléné is in fact a joint enterprise between Trichard and his business partner Elodie Bouvard, who runs a small organic vegetable farm at the domaine.

When the intitial Séléné vintages first appeared in Paris, they landed with a splash before, well, sinking. Nowadays Trichard admits that his trial-and-error approach was quite evident in his early vintages, which were often marred by bret. But the same dynamism, devotion, and intelligence that earned Trichard his initial clients in Paris have since seen his winemaking improve by leaps and bounds: the wines are now as charming as their labels. His (bret-free) 2015 old-vine Beaujolais tout court cuvée "Gisou" is a benchmark for the sector, as refined and complex a wine as it is possible to find south of Saint-Etienne-des-Oullières, outside the -Villages appellation.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jérome balmet, vaux-en-beaujolais

The tiny cellar space that Balmet shared with his father until this year.

Conventional wisdom of Beaujolais geography places the highest, most dramatic slopes in the granite soil crus clustered in the north of the region, with the landscape becoming gentler as one travels south towards the limestone hillsides of the Pierres Dorées. This is true in a general sense, but it overlooks certain notable high-altitude sites. The picturesque village of Oingt in the south is one. Then, southwest of the Brouilly appellation, there is Vaux-en-Beaujolais, a towering granite hill, the home of promising natural winemaker Jerôme Balmet.

From 2012 - 2015, Balmet shared a tiny cellar space with his dad, making a tiny, untaxable amount of wine from just 1.2ha of vines. Until now there has officially been just one red cuvée, bottled as Vin de France, and a small amount of rosé, plus a few magnums of stellar old-vine press-juice that were never commercially available.

In 2016, Balmet is joining the big(ger) leagues. As of January he took on the lease of 2.5ha of gently sloped vines near Saint-Etienne-des-Oullières, formerly tended by fellow natural winemaker Raphael Champier. He'll also begin vinifying at the facilities of the Château de Lacarelle, which owns the vines. This puts him in good company, alongside like-minded confrères like Romain des Grottes and Stephen Durieu de Lacarelle, who together comprise a fascinating nest of promising young natural winemakers at the château.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jean-françois promonet, leynes

Complaining is a national pastime throughout France, along with labour strikes, cigarette-smoking, and pétanque. Vignerons, whose livelihoods are utterly dependent upon climatic forces beyond their control, have throughout the generations developed their own nuanced sub-genre of fatalistic groaning, comparable to that which wizened sailors practice regarding the fickleness of the sea.

Yet even in this context of universal grievance, Leynes vigneron Jean-François Promonet stands alone.

An expert mechanic specialising agricultural machines, he has long roots in the Beaujolais and Maconnais, and as he tells it, he arrived at his present, tenuous situation of quasi-vigneronnage on the dangerously steep hillsides of Leynes almost against his will, through a series of misfortunes. Nowadays he speaks of his soaring, wind-swept old-vine granite vineyards the way Ahab spoke of the white whale, with the same mixture of devotion and loathing.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: hervé ravera, marchampt

My time in Beaujolais has left me with a strong distaste for the appellation of Beaujolais-Villages. Not for the wines themselves, of course. Just the appellation, its haziness. It began well enough, in 1946, when it was decreed that certain communes could append their names to the basic appellation of Beaujolais. But a later decree in 1950 created the blanket appellation Beaujolais-Villages - a designation that might as well have been conceived expressly to play down the influence of terroir in the region.

The -Villages designation was once useful for allowing large-scale négoçiant enterprises to indicate mainly granite-soil, gobelet-trained fruit sourced from throughout the region at large. But these companies set the market expectation, such that it's now rare to find vignerons who take advantage of the 1946 decree to promote their individual commune's terroir: Beauojolais-Lancié, Beaujolais-Quincié, or Beaujolais-Marchampt, for example. It's a shame, because the traditionally vinified wines of individual Beaujolais communes do indeed possess a character all their own. Where Quincié B-V often tends toward the rusticity and richness of nearby Régnié, Marchampt B-V is unique in its altitudinous, high mountain fruit.

Hervé Ravera, a sulfur-free natural winemaker who set up shop in Marchampt in 2007, avoids the appellation system altogether, bottling his tiny Beaujolais-Villages production as Vin de France. Ironically, alongside those of his neighbor Nicolas Chemarin, Ravera's wines are just about the purest expression of Marchampt terroir available today.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: justin dutraive, fleurie

"It's not very charming, as a terroir," says young Fleurie vigneron Justin Dutraive, as we tramp down a muddy path to the 8000m of Beaujolais vines he began leasing in 2015. "But it was a good terroir to start: all flat, very mechanizable, with low rent. And no one wanted to take it, so it was going to be uprooted otherwise."

Dutraive isn't being modest. The parcel from which he produced his first wine in 2015 hugs the Duboeuf-dominated village of Maison Blanche so closely it practically constitutes urban farming. To the south is a copse of trees and a stream; to the east, train tracks; to the west, a cornfield. To the north is the Hotel Les Maritonnes. "In the summer, when you're on the tractor, you stare at the pool," jokes Dutraive.

From this unlikely patch of what is known locally as "corn terroir," Dutraive produced a powerful Beaujolais tout-court as well as a pétillant-naturel. The parcel's poor drainage and proximity to the stream paid off in 2015's scorching dry-spell: he brought in a solid 42HL/ha. Less bountiful, but no less notable, was the micro-parcel of Fleurie "Chapelle des Bois" he also vinified that year. Just two barrels were produced, a small but very successful addition to his family's renowned range of wines from the cru.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: julien merle & nathalie banes, legny

Entering southern Beaujolais winemaker Julien Merle's cellar in Legny, I noted the low wooden ceilings above the cement vats and asked if he'd ever had issues with brettonamyces developing in tank. (Bret - the wild yeast often responsible for horsey aromas in wine - has been known to inhabit wood, sometimes causing entire cellars to be razed and reconstructed.) Merle shook his head.

"I think finally the bret is more of a worry for the vineyards higher up in Beaujolais, because the plants are very low," he explained. "We have the plants much higher, it’s cordon trained."

Cordon-training in the crus of Beaujolais is relatively rare - almost all vines are in traditional gobelet training, closer to the earth, where bret is said to reside. Few great vignerons in the crus cordon-train their vines, considering it anathema to quality-minded viticulture. If it's a cliché that many winemakers insist 'there are no rules' governing the production of great wine, it's because of seeming contradictions like this: in viticulture as in vinification, things go topsy-turvy as one travels between regions, or as here, between sub-regions of the same region. In Legny, on the faultline between the granite of north of Beaujolais and the clay-limestone of the south, Julien Merle is making stunningly pure and sturdy wines of the sort that renew my confidence that Beaujolais is worth a book-length study. And he does it by adapting the insights of natural-wine pioneers to the north to his own unique circumstances in the south.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: xavier benier, saint-julien

Saint-Julien vigneron and négoçiant Xavier Benier has long been an enigma to me. His unsulfured, unfiltered range of wines are well-represented around Paris, and nearly always offer excellent value for money. But for various reasons Benier's winemaking defies easy categorisation. The wine range seems to change every year; he has no website; the labels are a heterogenous hodgepodge; and Benier himself doesn't quite belong to any particular social group of like-minded winemakers, à la the 'Microscope Gang' of Villié-Morgon, or the wayward cult gathered around Philippe Jambon up north.

Until my visit to his cuvage last October, I didn't really know what to make of Benier.

I was to learn that part of the distance between Benier and his peers is merely geographic. Saint-Julien is quite far removed from the crus; it lies where the granite of Beaujolais-Villages cedes to the clay-limestone of Beaujolais tout court. Habitation is sparser and many mustard-yellow buildings evidence the proximity of the quarries of the pierres dorées. Benier is from Saint-Julien, and in something like the way libertarianism increases as one heads into the emptiness of the western US, his character reflects his surroundings, evincing a fierce independence that belies his diminutive, office-clerk figure. Over a glass of his remarkably good négoçiant Régnié, in the course of an anecdote about a dispute with the appellation, he'll casually recall arming himself with a sledgehammer.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: domaine leonis (raphael champier & cristelle lucca), villié-morgon

Odenas-born natural vigneron Raphael Champier decamped to a fixer-upper house and cellar on the outskirts of Villié-Morgon late last year. When I visited him and his girlfriend-slash-business partner Cristelle Lucca in January I asked him how he liked it in his new neighborhood, which is famously home to Beaujolais' most significant concentration of natural winemakers.

"Well," he said, scratching his head. "It's more complicated to go work in the vines."

The couples vines are in Brouilly, near Saint-Lager, and on the Côte de Brouilly, and in the Beaujolais-Villages appellation near Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières. It's about a twenty-minute drive to the nearest parcel. The couple agree that it's more than worth the commute to have their own cellar. Previously they worked in shared cellar facilities with other métayers at the Chateau de Lacarelle. While Champier derives from an extensive winemaking family and worked six years full-time for Saint-Etienne-de-la-Varenne's influential Jean-Claude Lapalu, his career trajectory has been anything but easy. His family is vast - he has fourteen brothers and sisters - and, in terms of winemaking, very conservative.

"We're making progress," Lucca jokes. "Now when we bring natural wine to the dinner table, they don't grimace anymore."

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jean-gilles chasselay, châtillon d'azergues

About half an hour into our visit last October, larger-than-life Pierre Dorées vigneron Jean-Gilles Chasselay was serving us barrel tastes of his unusual "Cuvée de la Marduette" Beaujolais when suddenly the cellar was filled with a joltingly cacaphonic guitar solo, loud as a klaxon. I thought our glasses might shatter.

Chasselay finished serving himself a taste and then produced his cell phone, shutting the sound off. "Rory Gallagher," he explained, grinning. "Irish tour, 1974. He was a crazy guitarist. He died from drinking too much, unfortunately."

Then he went back to explaining the "Cuvée de la Marduette," a micro-cuvée that, while atypical of his family's oeuvre, nonetheless seems symbolic of Chasselay's approach to his metier. He vinifies it like a vin de garde, i.e. with a relatively long vatting, then throws it oak barrels of varying age for between one and two months. Then, at what for other wines would be the start of the process of elevage, he abruptly reassembles the wine and bottles it without filtration or sulfur addition. "The vinification's finished but the elevage isn't done. So I say it's 'poorly raised,'" he says, adding, "I like people who are poorly raised."

n.d.p. in beaujolais: marcel joubert, quincié

The prolific and indefatigable Marcel Joubert, arguably the most senior natural winemaker in Brouilly, made his last vintage in 2015. He's been producing ruggedly natural wines in a plethora of appellations since meeting pathbreaking Morgon winemaker Marcel Lapierre at motorcycle rallies at the end of the 1980's.

The two winemakers couldn't have more different profiles today. Lapierre, who died in 2010, is a legend, the subject of books and cartoons, perpetually fêted in the press. Joubert, alive and well, is almost a ghost by comparison. While beloved by his peers in Beaujolais and his direct clients, Joubert's larger-than-life personality, like his individual winemaking style, remains unknown to most drinkers. A fourth-generation winemaker who began his career in 1972, Joubert belongs to a previous generation of Beaujolais winemakers for whom discretion bordering on anonymity was part of the game.

As of 2016, he's handing over the reins of his domaine to his tall blonde daughter Carine, who worked in human resources before deciding to devote herself to the family business. "I'll stay as an intern," he said slyly in November in his tasting room in Quincié. "If she lets me."

n.d.p. in beaujolais: nicolas chemarin, marchampt

Expect to hear a lot of bitching and moaning about Beaujolais in 2015. Alcohol levels are abnormally high for the region, in some cases turning what ought to be elegant, light-spirited wines into the Incredible Hulk. I tasted some primeurs this year that could overturn tractor-trailers.

More recently I've tasted tank samples from various cru producers that were more encouraging: the best wines manage to integrate the heat of the vintage into a kinetic, powerful whole. Furthermore, the unusual ripeness of the vintage wasn't bad news for everyone. 

In the backwoods Beaujolais-Villages hamlet of Marchampt, young natural winemaker Nicolas Chemarin stands to benefit. Marchampt lies southwest of Régnié at the foot of the Beaujolais vert, the mountains bordering the region's west, which serve not for viticulture, but rather for hunting and goat cheese production. Marchampt is at high elevation in the shadow of a mountain range, highly exposed to the north wind, meaning it's always about 3°C cooler than Morgon or Fleurie. So a little extra ripeness shows nicely on the wines from Chemarin's Beaujolais-Villages parcels. From the highest, a 600m altitude old-vine parcel called "Le Rocher," Chemarin has since 2012 quietly been producing a minor classic of the region. 

n.d.p. in beaujolais: anthony thévenet, villié-morgon

Almost everyone in Beaujolais has at least one nickname. To an outsider, it makes it difficult to follow conversations, because one has to remember all the variations on the ways people refer to any given local personage. (Furthermore one is sometimes unsure if one is entitled to employ all the nicknames.) Some nicknames are relatively straightforward: Morgon grand-master Jean Foillard, for example, is called, alternately, "Le P'tit Jean," a reference to his Napoleonic build, and "Jeff," a simple pronunciation of his initials.

Other nicknames are completely insane. Anthony Thévenet - no relation to Jean-Paul "Polpo" Thévenet, or any of the other more prominent local Thévenets - is an energetic, good-natured young natural winemaker who established his domaine in 2012, the same year he began working as a cellarhand for Foillard. I heard Thévenet's friend Romain Zordan refer to Thévenet as "Nioche," which, he later explained, derives originally from "Tête d'Hyène," or "Hyena's head," a comment on Thévenet's easy laughter and the sonics of his family name. "Tête d'Hyène" got abbreviated to "Hyène," which, in the programmatic Franco-slanguage Verlan, came out as "Nioche."

Easy to remember, right? Perhaps easier than the name Thévenet. At any rate, it's worth remembering Anthony Thévenet A.K.A. Nioche's name, because since 2013 he's been making some very promising Morgon's from his family's vines in the climat of Douby, and this year he's set to release his first vintage from the renowned Côte du Py.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: romain zordan, fleurie

Claude Zordan and Romain Zordan

Such are the nuances at play within natural winemaking in Beaujolais that the two young winemakers of the two families of the Château de Grand Pré, Romain Zordan and his cousin Yann Bertrand, express very distinct voices in their work, despite organically farming the same terroir, sharing much of the same cellar and equipment, and benefitting from the advice of some of the same mentors.

The differences in the wines are to some extent a reflection of differences in age and temperament. Yann Bertrand is a better student of biodynamics. Romain Zordan gets more invitations on hunting trips. Beaujolais is all the richer for containing both approaches.

Bertrand's wines have seen rapid success with his embrace of the aforementioned farming methods and of rigorously-controlled, cool-carbonic maceration techniques. Romain Zordan, at 29 the elder of the two winemakers by a half-decade, has been slower to adopt the same practices, though he appreciates their impact and applies them in certain cases. He's a genial, salt-of-the-earth dude whose empathy with the wider Beaujolais wine community seems to moderate his work at the side of the domaine he farms with his father Claude. Yet the wines he's making are already formidable and, indeed, necessary to an understanding of the terroir of Grand Pré.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: yann bertrand, fleurie

During pressing with Yvon and Jules Métras this September we were often joined around apéro hour by Jules' good friend Yann Bertrand, an extremely talented young Fleurie winemaker who lives a stone's throw away in Grand Pré. He often wore a vaguely pained expression when he arrived. 2015 in Beaujolais was a touch-and-go year for many winemakers, but Yann and his family suffered more than most.

"My grandfather died, we buried him, then the next day I heard that all my tanks had bret. Then my car broke down," he says, wincing. "I said to myself, 'Sometimes it’s best not even to think about it.'"

The Bertrand family shares cellar facilities with Yann's cousin and uncle, Romain Zordan and his father Claude, who make their own range of estimable natural Beaujolais under the name Château de Grand Pré. The story of the two winemaking families of the Château de Grand Pré is one I plan to explore in greater depth elsewhere. (Expect a post about the Zordans soon, too.) For now it seems worthwhile to discuss Yann Bertrand's work at at time when what many locals were calling his "beginner's luck" is being tested like never before.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: domaine thillardon, chénas

Paul-Henri Thillardon in the vines he rents from Château Les Boccards.

Contemporary Beaujolais is rife with opportunity - overlooked terroirs, abandoned vines, appellations ripe for rehabilitation. But few young vignerons have committed to such ambitious challenges as Paul-Henri and Charles Thillardon, who have positioned themselves as the future of Beaujolais' smallest, sleepiest cru, Chénas.

After graduating with a BTS viti-oeno from the Lycée Bel-Air, Paul-Henri says his initial, outmoded goal was to make all ten crus. Much has changed since he founded the domaine in 2008. "We even used select yeast, our first year," he says. "Because I didn't know how to make natural wine, I'd never seen it in my life, and I'd never drunk it."

Then in 2009 he met Fleurie winemaker Jean-Louis Dutraive, a lynchpin of the Fleurie natural winemaking scene who himself had just attained organic certification for his own domaine. "He was the most open," says Paul-Henri, citing Dutraive as introducing him to the aesthetics of natural Beaujolais. "From there I met Julie Balagny, and everyone else." Gradually, as his domaine has grown to its present 12ha, Paul-Henri's winemaking has aligned with those of his mentors. 2015 is the first year he's aimed for long, cool semi-carbonic macerations, refrigerating the harvest for the first time, and vinifying entirely whole-cluster.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: sylvain chanudet, fleurie

The most famous man in Beaujolais is not who you might think. His wines remain under-acknowledged on the market, but in terms of sheer physical presence in the region - in vineyards, at other domaines, at the cafés of Villié-Morgon and Fleurie - no one compares with
Domaine de Prion's Sylvain Chanudet: his tousled iron hair, NBA frame, and impish grin could be a trademark for the region.

His ubiquity is partly attributable to his side business, a nursery in nearby Drancy that supplies many of the region's natural winemakers (among many others) with massal selection vine grafts. It is literally his business to know other winemakers and remain aware of their vineyard conditions.*

But Chanudet, like his friend Jean-Louis Dutraive, also clearly relishes the Beaujolais community. Very few know it better. From the purebred terroir of his own high, steep parcels, Chanudet creates muscular, unfiltered wines that often belie the cliché of his cru's femininity. Recent years have seen a refinement of his style, one that I expect to accelerate since the domaine, formerly run jointly, was separated between him and his brother Christian in 2014. But among Sylvain Chanudet's eccentricities is a devil-may-care attitude towards his commercial calendar. He releases the wines when he feels they're finished, not before. When I visited after harvest this year, he'd just bottled the 2012's and 2013's.