Our Wine Choice: Château des Bachelards – Comtesse de Vazeilles Fleurie 2019

The Château des Bachelards – Comtesse de Vazeilles Fleurie 2019 is one of the most exciting avant-garde red wines of Beaujolais, a category whose time is coming fast. It is very concentrated with great flinty minerality, and it is just beginning a lifetime that will be measured in decades.

Although they have their own distinctive personalities, Beaujolais cru (de facto village) wines like this cost between a third and a quarter of the price of village wines from Burgundy to the north. That’s a rather new situation, because into the 1970s there was approximate price parity between the wines of Fleurie and, say, Gevrey-Chambertin.

Of course, that price difference is one of the things driving interest in them, but there are other factors. The gamay grape, from which all red Beaujolais wines are made, has a healthy natural acidity that doesn’t collapse during heat waves, as pinot noir can. This makes the region one of the winners of climate change, and the 2019 vintage is the perfect example of this.

The Chateau des Bachelards estate in Fleurie has more than 900 years of history, but in recent years it has become one of the most dynamic producers of the entire region thanks to the energy and vision of Alexandre de Vazeilles. She switched the 12 hectares of 60- to 100-year-old vineyards to biodynamic cultivation, a rarity in Beaujolais.

More daring still was the way she introduced the winemaking techniques she learned from working at Chateau Latour in Pauillac and Domaine de Montile in Volnay, “except without all the new oak,” as she explained to me.

That really helps this wine sing, giving it a stunning fragrance, purity and precision. And that’s what really gets me about it – the way the wine manages to be deep and complex, yet also full of what the French call joie de vivre, the joy of life. For full enjoyment, we recommend decanting the wine to aerate it. 

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor