Négoçiants tend to suffer from an enthusiasm gap among wine drinkers. Compared with the vigneron who grows the grapes he or she turns into wine, the arts of the négoçiant can seem coldly mercantile. Few are more aware of this dynamic than Christophe Pacalet, whose business remains inextricably linked, for many wine drinkers, with that of his late uncle, Morgon vigneron Marcel Lapierre, who helped Pacalet set up his business in 1999.
Pacalet today produces a broad range of wines from purchased grapes, encompassing seven of the ten crus of Beaujolais, along with a Beaujolais Blanc, a primeur, and, from the 2015 vintage, two cuvées of Beaujolais-Villages. The bottles almost all bear similar, slightly anonymizing labels, which, along with Pacalet's formidable market presence in the USA and Japan, bely his business' fundamentally small-scale, artisanal nature. Pacalet harvests all the grapes with his own team, pressing in an old wooden vertical press, vinifying in restored wooden tanks. Most cuvées see aging in old barrels, many sourced from Pacalet's renowned cousin, the Burgundy négoçiant Philippe Pacalet.
On the day I first visited in October 2015, most of that year's wines had already been barreled. Moreso even than the aromas of fermenting gamay, what filled the cellar that afternoon was Christophe's excitement with several of his new fruit sources that year: a Chénas and a Saint Amour. "I just got the analyses back, and the Chénas has finished its sugar," he declared. "So this will be interesting! Let's taste it!"
