The Beaujolais Rabbit Hole

 

I decided to get my head around Beaujolais.  Yes, this is falling down a bit of a rabbit hole, but it's much better than my brief great interest in Faugeres that had cropped up in the past.  Granted, it's not much better, but it's still better.  There could be a practical application here.  There is at least a chance that the various Brits in this MW thing will ask me about Beaujolais whereas I don't think there is any belief in the program that the Languedoc even produces wine despite it making 3 billion (with a "B") bottles a year and accounting for one third of all French wine production.  There's no time for the Languedoc when the wines of Elgin bless us with their existence.  Cue triumphant trumpet calls.  Alas, I have gone on a tangent...

I have been interested in Beaujolais for a long time.  I think it appeals to my Midwestern sense of rooting for the underdog little guy.  Beaujolais has long been the wrong side of the tracks to the Cote d'Or, and now with the explosion of prices in Burgundy that gap has only been widened.  There are producers in Macon looking down their nose at Beaujolais (but almost all the big Burgundy players are looking for good sites to buy in Morgon and Moulin-a-Vent).  The producers working their ass off tending short little old bush vines on these steep little rocky hills that get pummeled by hail all summer have not chosen an easy path.   I have no idea what kind of masochist grows grapes in Chiroubles.  Think of it like this...  The producers of Burgundy are like the people living in those three bedroom condos with doormen by Central Park in NYC with the Beaujolais being the waiters living in a shared 5th floor walkup in Alphabet City.  Technically they are all Burgundian wine producers much in the same way that Sarah Jessica Parker and your cousin that is a free lance graphic designer both live in New York.  All neighborhoods are not the same.

For me as a curious young wine drinker, Beaujolais had been the Georges Duboeuf flower label bottles, a series of completely interchangeable bottles of pretty good soft tannin reds.  These were all clean bright red fruit wines, notable mostly for their freshness and fruit purity.  They had the same sense of place you would ascribe to an Applebee's location.  I had read enough articles about the Crus all having their own profiles, but it was hard to believe that it was all as simple as "Morgon has darker fruit, Moulin a Vent meant some tannin and Fleurie was lifted floral aromatics".  The problem was, deeper dive information was hard to come by once you'd exhausted the articles on the mysterious natural wine producer movement who made 11 bottles of wine you could only purchase in London or distant ramshackle backwoods French cafes.

Natasha Hughes MW came out with her excellent "The Wines of Beaujolais" book this year, part of the Academie Du Vin Library series, which as far as I can tell is the only current book on the region that has concrete information.  That kickstarted me again on this region.  The book left me with some takeaways that upended most of the Commonly Known Facts Of Beaujolais.  When you read about Beaujolais in most books, the subject matter is now the fairly dead-in-the-water Bojo Nouveau category.  "Listen kid, all you need to know is that Beaujolais=Carbonic Maceration."  The truth is much more complex as the winemaking in Bojo is as wildly eclectic as it is in Burgundy with many of the same whole cluster approaches leading to decision matrixes on de-stemming, fermentation temperature, maceration, vessel, and aging.  Then you get into the soils, which I'd thought was "most of it is granite or limestone clay", and that thought is much too simplistic.  There are 300 different soil types divided into 25 broad categories with each of the crus (and sometimes individual vineyards) having a bit of this and a bit of that.  In theory, the granite soils of the North give you linear perfumed character and the South with the clays give you more dense muscular wines, but it's much more complicated.  So now you can combine the variable soils with the winemaking decision tree plus a large number of natural winemaking orientation and you can see how difficult it is to say "Since this wine is from this village, it must taste like that.".  The shit is complicated.

I decided to buy a mixed case of wines and taste my way through them to see if I could get any indication of character from each Cru.  Some of them I don't know if I'd even tried before like Saint-Amour or Regnie.  I mean, when is the last time you rolled into a restaurant and said "Hey man, you got any Regnie by the glass back there?".  I knew upfront that there were too many goddamn variables to try one or two samples from a village to say "A-HA!  Julienas ALWAYS tastes like THIS!!!", but I figured I'd at least know more than I did before by opening some bottles.  I did as much deep diving as I could prior to opening the wines to get a sense of their winemaking to use as a cross reference to what I had in the glass in front of me. Going into it, there were a few key practices that my chosen artisan producers seemed to be embracing at the moment like whole cluster fermentation, organic (or biodynamic) viticulture with bush vines, native yeasts, traditional cement fermentation tanks, and limited SO2 use of under 20ppm.  The major differences appeared to be in maceration time/method, aging vessels, and use of at least partial carbonic maceration as a natural by product of a whole cluster approach.  Sort of sounds like Burgundy, doesn't it?

Some macro takeaways from this tasting... If you don't have a decent tolerance of natural winemaking with the inherent by-products of a little brett here, a little mouse taint there, and funky wild yeast ferment profiles, this might not be the place for you.  A lot of the wines reminded me of tasting my way around the Loire Valley in Saumur/Bourgeil/Chinon where the low levels of SO2 can bring some snappy aromatic fruit but also remind you that it's time to muck out the barn.  I personally don't mind the barnyard of brett as long as it doesn't overwhelm the primary fruit.  There was this band I used to see sometimes called Cowboy Mouth who had a really good drummer that sang a lot of the songs.  They used this stage setup where he was out front with the guitar players flanking him on either side.  I prefer my drums like my brett, more like Ringo tastefully in the back and not leading the band out front.  The JL Dutraive Grand ‘Cour Brouilly 2023 and the Julien Sunier “Fleurie” 2023 both had that drummer set up dangerously close to the lip of the stage if ya get my drift.

The granite soils of Moulin-A-Vent and the wines I sampled from Julienas gave that austere tannic backbone that pointed to long aging where with enough time it would be hard to tell the difference between an aged Burgundy of lesser pedigree.  The Michel Tete “Clos du Fief” Julienas Cuvee Tradition 2024 and a 2022 Domaine Anita "Moulin-a-Vent Tres Vieille Vigne Les Caves" (that I'd tasted previously) give you a wet rock sensation that goes hand in hand with so many granite soil wines.  Meanwhile the Louis-Claude Desvignes “Morgon Javernieres” 2024 gives the darker leaning fruit and earthy broad finish I associate with these type of clay soils.  The counterpoint wine for a quick three wine comparison flight would be the Domaine Chapel “Chiroubles” 2022 from the famed pink granite soils which is all bright toned red fruit with a subtle herbal streak giving lift and complexity.  Soil definitely plays a part in these wines, but how big a part I am not totally sure.

My biggest takeaway was the winemaking imprint on these wines being the largest point of differentiation.  Before anyone sends me a "you don't know what the fuck you're talking about" email, I am saying upfront that these individual grape sources show an undeniable stamp of unique place.  Like recording a song in a studio, if the band performance isn't good, you're not going to "fix it in the mix".  The winemaker can only work with the grapes that come in.  That being said, you can taste the triage on the Domaine Chapel wine.  The low temperature ferments and resulting lifted aromatics are all over the Julien Sunier "Fleurie" 2023.  The Thillardon “les Vibrations” Chenas 2023 hums with low intervention low SO2 winemaking choices.  The weighted grill keeping the cap submerged on the Domaine des Billards Barbet Saint Amour 2022 is evident with their tannins and deep color.  My mindset right now is that Beaujolais is a region of winemaking first and site second.  If you find someone with techniques you like, buy around their portfolio to see the crus you like best.  Telling the difference between a Chenas and Fleurie blind?  Besides locals and presumably Natasha Hughes, I don't think there are many people that can do that parlor trick well. 

A casual consumer of Beaujolais is doomed.  Almost any article you read about the region starts off saying "The region is poor as shit because they used to sell their grapes too cheap to big producers (i.e. Duboeuf) and now they can't get good prices on their wines because everyone just assumes it's all Nouveau inside the bottle".  I think it's more along the lines of "no one knows what the hell is in there, even engaged consumers".  I am about as engaged a consumer as you could hope for if you're making Beaujolais.  I essentially bought blind from a retailer that I trusted knowing that the wine is each bottle could be either A) a fun little tart fruity thing B) a dark murky black berry earthy thing C) a brett bomb with odd wild ferment flavors that I would nod along and say "interesting" while having no intention of pouring another glass.  That's no way to drive regional sales.  

These wines as a whole were very good to excellent quality, definitely providing strong value at their price points between $20-$50 depending on the wine.  The region as a whole needs to figure out how to install the idea into consumers of being a Burgundy substitute of the lower price tier Burgundy stuff.  By slipping into the $25 price slot for their Cru bottles and $40-$49 for their exceptional bottles they can beat or at least compete with most Burgundy pinot noir on that level.  The challenge will be to somehow not get lost in the murk trying to justify price increases with overly complicated premier cru and grand cru designations destined to be politicized.  If I'm them, my marketing approach is communicating the idea that all the renegade artisan winemaking, small family ownership, and expressions of tiny little plots of land that is now Luxury Gold Card Velvet Rope Wine in Burgundy still exists in Beaujolais.  Now is the time to get in early, before the second wave of ironic mustache Somm douchebag guys drive up prices and gobble up the cool producers.  Beaujolais, hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to figure it out.    

I don't think that's how it's going to go, but what do I know?  If I'm you, I'd get a group of people together, have everyone toss in $50 and buy some good producers from a retailer that gets access to the good stuff in New York or DC.  Buy wines from Moulin-A-Vent, Morgon, Fleurie, and Chiroubles at the very least and open some bottles.  I'm telling you, at the very least, you will leave with an impression of "these wines are more serious than I thought" and at best you've found a good horizontal for that $58 Bourgogne Red someone is trying to sell you.  

Go get 'em kid.