Putting the beau back in Beaujolais
A quick two days in Beaujolais with another wine writer in late March reminded me that a) the countryside is some of France’s loveliest, b) the best of Beaujolais wines are worth seeking out, c) as elsewhere, the world of wine is changing rapidly and it’s time to update our notions about this wine region.
It’s 55 km long (about 30 miles) and sits north of Lyons, with Macon on the eastern edge. The great vineyards of Burgundy are just to the north.
Start with a) the lovely. I drove south from Charolles on a frosty Burgundian morning, after two days in a charming country home, hiking little farm paths there. En route to Beaujolais back roads took me up and down and around, twisting and turning, often on what felt like goat tracks through quiet hamlets. It’s enough to make the heart sing — and then you sail down into Julienas, arguably the prettiest of the Beaujolais villages. Here’s a visual sampler of the burgundian heartland, outsidethe wine areas:
From Nouveau Beaujolais to Bojo’s best
By now, if you haven’t heard of Beaujolais Nouveau you’ve had your head in a wine sandbank, but if that’s all you know of this charming wine region and its Gamay-born delights, here’s more.
Recent history: the idea of making new wine into an event was hatched in the 1950s as a way to get just-bottled (new/nouveau) Beaujolais into the bistros in Paris ahead of other regions’ wines. The concept took off wildly in the 1970s thanks in large part to a marketing effort by large winery Georges Duboeuf in Fleurie, to get the whole world partying to the sound of new Beaujolais tinkling into glasses. It worked, but an unfortunate side effect was that some cellars/sellers then flooded the market with young wine from over-produced and unripened grapes. People who know little about wine began to see Beaujolais wines as cheap, a bit fizzy at times, fruity at first bang and then sharp and, frankly, mostly designed for a raucous party night out. Wine Enthusiast sums up the commercial situation, especially in the US market; sales have been dropping and are predicted to fall more. For the wineries, a positive note is that it’s an opportunity to make a name for better Beaujolais wines.
Gamay comes in several varieties, with Gamay Noir the main one, especially in Beaujolais. Two-thirds of France’s Gamay is grown here. Very few other grapes are planted in the region, other than some Chardonnay. With a variety of soils and landscapes (hilly in the north, flattening out in the south), the 12 AOCs of the region produce subtly different wines from this grape, with red fruits dominating all the wines’ profiles. The region prides itself on its winemaking process, carbonic maceration, and any visit here should involve time in a winery to understand how this works and why it matters.
Change comes dropping, at times gently, often not
For two centuries Gamay was seen as giving a lesser wine. The first Beaujolais appeallations date back less than 100 years. But by 2012, Wine Grapes by Jancis Robinson et al noted that “Until the early years of the twenty-first century, recommended Gamay producers would have been entirely made up of those producers with a long tradition in Beaujolais … there is now a perceptible influx of serious, hopeful newcomers, several of them from further north, in Burgundy proper.”
Established locals were also coming up with innovative ideas. One of these was Marcel Lapierre, whose grandfather had settled in the region, selling grapes to the cooperative. His father had taken the daring step of bottling his own wine, under his own label. Marcel was even bolder: under the influence of chemist Jules Chauvet he decided to make wine without any added sulphur, in 1973. And with that step, just as the influence of the agro-chemical industry was growing, Beaujolais organic winemaking arguably had its start. Lapierre and three others influenced by Chauvet became known as the Gang of Four, a local group that focused on wines made from older vines with natural yeasts, no added sulphur and little intervention. It’s taken 50 years, though, to create a larger base of like-minded wineries in the region. Twenty years ago — I remember this from a visit to Bordeaux, for the spring primeur wine sales — French organic growers were still pooh-poohed, often considered slightly wacky outsiders. Today, there is a thriving organic certification system (based on EU regulations) that is starting to help consumers understand these wines, which now hold a respected place in the industry.
Growth in demand nationwide is growing. Organic represented 4.7% of all wine consumed in France, Beverage Daily reported in 2022. These are still minority wines, but conversion rates of vineyards is increasing and consumer demand is stronger than in the rest of the wine industry, in part thanks to direct sales (winery to consumer), which account for nearly half of organic wine sales. Shops and restaurants each have about one quarter of sales. From 2013 to 2022 the number of certified hectares of vines grew from 62,500 to 170,800, Agence Bio (the national observatory for organic farming) figures show. The number of producers grew during that period from 4,700 to 12,000.
Beaujolais is not one of the main regions converting to organic, however. And yet, there is good progress.
Jean-Louis Dutraive at Domaine Grand’Cour in Fleurie began making wine in the 1970s, with his father. He says that Lapierre was an enormous influence. “He educated us, he pushed us, he said no, don’t just get it [sulphur] down, do without it.” Dutraive was unhappy that he and his young family were living in the middle of the vineyard, with chemical spraying around them. Perhaps as a relative newcomer he was more open to new ideas: his father had moved into the region from Brouilly, a classic case of a family farm not big enough to support two sons.
For the past 30 years the Dutraives have not used sulphur in the vineyards and it’s been 20 years since they used it in the cellar. It is sometimes added in small amounts to help preserve bottled wine, but he says they are able to work well without adding it and his goal is 0–0–0 sulphur (vines, wine fermentation, bottling).
The domain is now run by Dutraive’s three children (he remains active) and although the winery has grown, the family began buying in grapes from other organic growers after the disastrous hail storms of 2016 and 2017. It wasn’t easy, he says — they didn’t have much of a harvest, either, and the number of organic growers is relatively small. The forced shift away from making wine only from their own grapes has brought some advantages. He began to work with Cinsault as well as Gamay grapes, expanding their line of wines. “It was very interesting for me. Like others here, I’d only ever worked with Gamay. It’s still very fruity, but it adds a bit of lightness.”
The winery has been moving to terroir wines since the 1990s, separating out the grapes from the family’s three very different vine parcels for higher end wines. Grand’Cour has granite on a plateau while Chappelle des Bois has, for example, very deep, sandy soil. This is the path of the future, he told us as we hiked to Champagne, one of these terroirs. (And yes, they do have legal labeling issues, just as the Swiss village of Champagne does, thanks to threats from the bigger Champagne region to the north. “It’s an ongoing ‘discussion’,” he smiles.)
Another gradual shift is towards monopole wines, a French term for a legally designated area controlled entirely by one vineyard. “But this is not yet on the labels,” says Dutraive, because there could be complications with Premier Grand Cru labeling, for which changes are currently under discussion.
It was next to the Champagne vineyard that we saw another innovation, two autonomous robots — driverless tractors that were a first for me — neatly mowing between the rows of vines at neighbouring winery. The weight is much less than that of a traditional vineyard vehicle, important in terms of compacting the soil. The machines also cost less. A woman was piloting the robots; she needs to program it, but overall labour-saving is significant and the machines have a good degree of accuracy. They are flexible and can be used on slopes up to 30 and in some situations 40 degrees.
The roots of organic Beaujolais
Marcel Lapierre winery has a total of 18 hectares, 8 of which are in Morgan, mostly next to the old family cellar that reflects the 200 years the Lapierres have been farming here. Camille, the winemaker, and her brother Matthieu jointly own and run the winery, since their father’s death in 2010. They are maintaining the strong tradition of organic wines, but adding their own experience — in the case of Marie a few years as a sommelier in Courcheval and Biarritz in France and 3.5 years of travels in Africa and South America. And studies at the School of Microbiology in Beaune once she decided to join the family business.
She rebuffs some popular notions about organic winemaking, especially the idea that you mostly leave it alone. “Natural — we try to do it, it’s difficult, but you have to be careful. We can’t work without a microscope anymore. It helps you to work in advance,” identifying problems, finding solutions earlier in the process. Her father, she recalls, wrote down everything and those records are useful today. “We’re seeing other yeasts today, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. There are 1,000 yeasts in a drop of wine!”
Reduction, which can give animal smells to wines, and related problems, are avoided in part by finishing fermentation in barrels “to help protect against oxidation”. A service tip: she suggests the wine be put in a carafe rather than decanted, to aerate it.
What matters for her is that she makes wine with “100% natural yeasts and without SO₂.” She is not interested in biodynamic winemaking, believing that since they have never used chemicals “we don’t have to put life back into the soil.”
The winery, like Grand’Cour, has suffered from weather damage— in early April 2021 they lost 40% of their harvest to a heavy frost. They now buy in grapes from other organic growers, but mainly because there is a good market for their wines and “we don’t want a bigger vineyard and we don’t want to manage more people. And the others [who sell their grapes] are happy” because the wine to which they contribute is good. For quality assurance the winery takes samples three weeks before working with other growers’ grapes.
Marcel Lapierre also has a special approach to replanting. Each year some 4,000 vines are replaced, some in the spring, some in the fall, complanting new vines with old ones, a field solution that she believes helps the soil.
