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.

beaujolais harvests 2016

Max Breton's team at the end of day in his old vines at Saint Joseph in Morgon.

Anything I post on the blog right now will rightfully be drowned out by the post-election din, i.e. the anguished, horrified screams of anyone with even a passing, sentimental attachment to democracy in America.

But with the third week of November approaching fast, I thought I'd dash out some notes on another pressing issue, the year's Beaujolais vintage.

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: 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.