Old vines rest during the winter on the gentle slopes of Moulin-à-Vent, one of Beaujolais’ top Crus.
The Beaujolais region of France has come of age as quality wine producers and women winemakers are responsible for many of the most exciting new wines. What exactly does that sweeping statement mean?
Let’s start with the first element of our current assessment of the region. After tasting almost 400 wines from the region south of Burgundy and north of the Rhône we can say with confidence that Beaujolais is producing an ever- increasing number of outstanding red wines in a growing diversity of styles that go far beyond the easy quaffability of Beaujolais Nouveau. Twenty-nine of the wines we tasted, or slightly more than 10 percent rated 95-plus; an impressive hit rate.
It’s two years since I last tasted Beaujolais intensively for JamesSuckling.com and that enabled me to see recent changes very clearly and gain an overview of the progress the region’s leading winemakers made. That’s particularly striking in the Cru wines from the 10 appellations that form the highest category of Beaujolais. The Crus are roughly are comparable to Village appellations in Burgundy, ranging in size from 225 hectares / 556 acres for Chenas to 1,245 hectares / 3,076 acres for Brouilly. However, generally the prices are way more friendly than for Burgundy wines, especially premier and grand cru Burgundies.
Château des Bachelards – Comtesse de Vazeilles offers a range of character and style, particularly the silky Fleurie Le Clos 2018.
These crus were the source of our highest-rated wines, all three rating 97 points. These are not only extremely impressive wines, but also strikingly different in character and style. The Chateau des Bachelards – Comtesse de Vazeilles Fleurie Le Clos 2018 is super-silky and refined the Domaine Anita Moulin-a-Vent La Rochelle 2019 concentrated and plush and the Yohan Lardy Moulin-a-Vent Vieilles Vignes de 1903 2019 enormously deep with a striking smoked bacon character.
For us this diversity is the sure sign of a maturing wine region and it was also clearly present in the eight wines wines that rated 96 points. For example, the incredibly floral expressiveness of the Château Thivin Côte-de-Brouilly Cuvée Zaccharie 2019 and the densely structured Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Côte du Py 2019 are both great reds unlike anything else on Planet Wine.
The statistics confirm the trend towards higher quality. Back in 2000 Beaujolais Cru wines accounted for 26 percent of the region’s total production, whereas in 2020 the figure was 43 percent. Add in Beaujolais Villages (26 percent of total production in 2020), the mid-level appellation for the region and you have more than two thirds of all Beaujolais! That’s a total contrast to the early 1990s when the Beaujolais Nouveau fashion was at its peak and more than half of the region’s entire wine production was sold under this designation.
We’ve got nothing against Beaujolais Nouveau, and the ritual of its release at midnight on the third Thursday of November can be a lot of fun. But these light, fruity red wines need to be drunk within months of release. Rarely did we taste one worthy of a 90-plus rating. That’s because the winemaking methods used all aim at getting the wines ready for bottling just one to two months after the harvest. The real problem with Nouveau is how the fashion for it persuaded most consumers outside France that Beaujolais is always a light red with little character or aging potential. Although Beaujolais certainly can taste like that, our recent tastings show that although it is often so much more.
The twin great vintages of 2018 and 2019 showcase this beautifully. 2019 is probably the most consistently exciting vintage for Beaujolais since 1976, although we still have a soft spot for 2015. These wines have the classic lively acidity and vibrant aromas of the region’s reds from the indigenous gamay grape with lots of floral, spice and licorice notes. The 2018 vintage was the warmest growing season on record and mildew in June-July dramatically reduced crop levels. The best 2018s are powerful and concentrated with fine tannins and enough acidity to balance. Some vineyards experienced drought stress and/or were picked a bit too late resulting in atypically soft wines.
However, generally speaking the string of warm vintages since 2015 has proven that gamay copes remarkably well with the new climatic situation. For example, pinot noir in Burgundy is more challenged.
Alexandra de Vazeilles of Chateau des Bachelards produces wines inspired by Bordeaux, Burgundy and Northern Rhone.
A striking aspect of the results is the number of women in the leading group of winemakers. Anita Kuhnel of Domaine Anita was born in the greater Beaujolais region, but became a professional cyclist before starting to make wine in Morocco back in 1996. She founded Domaine Anita in the town of Chenas in 2015, but her twin obsessions with quality and strictly vinifying each plot of vineyard separately earned her two 95-plus ratings in our report. Her wines are concentrated and plush. Korean-born Mee Godard founded her eponymous domaine in Villie-Morgon in 2013 after studying winemaking in Oregon and Montpellier/Languedoc (one of France’s top wine schools). She makes daringly powerful, tannic wines that are the exact opposite of Beaujolais Nouveau! Three of them rated 95-plus. Equally significant for such young wineries is the fact that every wine we tasted from them impressed us.
Alexandra de Vazeilles’ story is arguably yet more extreme. After gaining an MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg in Chicago she made the money with which she bought Chateau des Bachelards in Fleurie (founded by the Benedictine monks of Cluny around 1100) back in 2007 by working as a strategy consultant for tech companies in the United States. Then she learned winemaking by working at Château Latour in Bordeaux and Domaine de Montille in Volnay, Burgundy. Not surprisingly her wines are inspired by those of these regions and the Northern Rhone.
De Vazeilles is an outspoken proponent of a pragmatic approach to biodynamic farming, calling it “a shock-absorber for the warming climate” and she rejects all the modern vinification methods (e.g. macération carbonique) that are widespread in the region. “Today the wines of the 1959s and 1960s – from before these methods were introduced – show density, complexity and freshness. Back then the wines of Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent were more expensive than those of Gevrey-Chambertain and Nuits-Saint-Georges in Burgundy!” Her goal and that of the region’s other dynamic winemakers is to climb back there.
95pt+ Beaujolais – keep an eye out for the Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent.
Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent were amongst the more successful Cru in our 2021 Beaujolais tastings with four – and seven wines rated 95-plus each. However, both were overshadowed by the 11 wines rating 95-plus Morgon achieved. They were from Domaine de Colonat, Domaines Dominique Piron, Jean Foillard, Jean-Marc Burgaud (2), Julien Sunier, Laurent Gauthier, Mee Godard (2), Michel Guignier (2). Eight producers with a common commitment to quality in one location is what economists call a cluster and no wonder this is the Cru that’s been generating the most excitement in markets around Planet Wine.
Inversely, one might say that Régnié is a seriously underperforming Cru, because no wines from there rated 95 or more, but we feel this would ignore the large number of really good wines being made there today. In contrast, Chenas had one 95-point wine from Chenas, but not many others that impressed us. However, it’s also the smallest Cru. What is clear is how the other Crus need to build clusters like that of Morgon. We feel that with just a couple more of them Beaujolais would gain more traction in the market.
On vinification techniques no pattern is clear enough for us to make a statement that one vinification type is inherently better suited to the gamay red wines of the region than the others. For example, the winemaking behind Château des Bachelards Fleurie Le Clos 2018 is inspired by Burgundy, while Yohan Lardy describes the winemaking for his Moulin-à-Vent Vieille Vignes de 1903 as “maceration semi-carbonique” and both rated 97. It would be possible to give dozens of examples like this.
The one question mark hanging over Beaujolais is the willingness of international markets to recognize the quality of the new wines and pay for that excellence. Political factors may influence this too. Before the US introduced punitive tariffs on French wines almost 550,000 cases of Beaujolais were exported there annually. Now the tariffs are gone producers must rebuild these sales. Pre-Brexit the UK took just over 480,000 cases of Beaujolais each year but that business has surely just taken a big hit.
Ironically, for savvy wine consumers the above should be positive, because prices are not going to increase any time soon. So, buy and drink Beaujolais is our message.
– Stuart Pigott, senior editor
