The place#
Beaujolais is the 55 kilometres of hills between the northern edge of Lyon and Mâcon, west of the Saône, in the east of France. The south, the Pierres Dorées, is clay-limestone and golden-stone villages. The north is granite, home of the ten crus and where I spend my time: Villié-Morgon under the Côte du Py, Fleurie under its chapel of La Madone, Odenas and Saint-Lager at the foot of Mont Brouilly, and Beaujeu, the historic capital.
It is a working landscape: bush vines in the old parcels, small villages, tastings in the cellar under the house. For decades Beaujolais meant Nouveau to the world; prices stayed low, land stayed in families, and growers had room to experiment. That is how Villié-Morgon became the village where the modern natural wine movement was worked out. Of all the corners of France I pour from, this is where I feel most at home.
Terroir: pink granite and blue stone#
The crus lie between 200 and 500 metres on east-facing slopes above the Saône plain. The base rock is pink granite, which weathers into a coarse sand called gore: it drains fast, warms quickly and gives the light, perfumed side of Gamay in Fleurie, Chiroubles, Régnié and most of Brouilly.
Two hills are different. Mont Brouilly, 484 metres, and the Côte du Py above Villié-Morgon, 358 metres, are old volcanic rock, a blue diorite the growers call pierre bleue, with schist on the Py. It weathers into roche pourrie, rotten rock, and gives darker, firmer wine with an iron edge that wants a few years. Morgon has its own verb, morgonner: in bottle it slowly turns Burgundian.
The climate is semi-continental with a Mediterranean pull up the Rhône: 18 to 24 °C in May and June, over 30 °C most summers, harvest from late August to mid-September. Hail is the recurring worry.
Gamay: whole bunches, cold cellars#
Gamay is about 97 percent of the vineyard. Philip the Bold banned it from Burgundy on 31 July 1395 as a bad and disloyal plant; it found its home on the granite to the south, where it ripens and Pinot Noir does not.
The regional method is whole-bunch semi-carbonic maceration: uncrushed clusters go into the vat, the bottom bunches split and ferment, the carbon dioxide blankets the rest, and inside the intact berries fermentation starts without yeast. Short and warm, it gives the banana of Nouveau. Long and cold, two to four weeks with chilled fruit, native yeasts and little or no sulfur, it gives red fruit, silk, pepper and a stony grip.
The long, cold version is the Chauvet school. Jules Chauvet (1907–1989), a chemist and négociant in La Chapelle-de-Guinchay, worked out how to ferment cleanly without added sulfur, and Marcel Lapierre put his ideas into practice in Villié-Morgon from 1981. What that means in the glass I set out in natural wine explained.
Twelve appellations share about 13,500 hectares: Beaujolais, Beaujolais-Villages and the ten crus, Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly (AOC 1938), Régnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas and Saint-Amour. Morgon has six named climats; Côte du Py and Corcelette are the two you will meet most. Nouveau arrives on the third Thursday of November, a party I enjoy once a year and do not build tours around.
Producers to know#
The gang of four, Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet of Villié-Morgon and Régnié, were named by their American importer Kermit Lynch. All four learned from Chauvet: organic farming, old vines, late picking, whole bunches, long cold maceration, no added yeast, no chaptalisation, no filtration, little or no sulfur. Yvon Métras in Fleurie is often counted as the fifth; Julie Balagny makes natural Fleurie today.
Domaine Marcel Lapierre, Villié-Morgon. Founded in 1909 by Michel Lapierre; Marcel took over in 1973 and from 1981 worked without added sulfur, commercial yeast or chemical fertiliser. He died in 2010; his children Mathieu and Camille run the estate with their mother Marie, about 18 hectares of certified organic Gamay on the Côte du Py and other Morgon lieux-dits. The Morgon comes as N, without added sulfur, and S, with a small dose at bottling: the best classroom I know for the question I am asked most. Tasting by appointment.
Jean Foillard, Villié-Morgon. Jean took over his father’s vines in 1980 and built the domaine with his wife Agnès; their son Alex bottles Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly under his own name. About 14 organic hectares, the core on the Côte du Py. Three to four weeks of cool maceration, six to nine months in used Burgundy barrels, no fining or filtration, minimal or no sulfur. Morgon Côte du Py is dark cherry, violet and stone. Not a tourist cellar; I ask months ahead.
Château Thivin, Odenas, is the classic counterpoint. Zaccharie Geoffray and Marguerite Bernard bought the château at auction on 8 June 1877; the family had grown vines since 1743, and Thivin is the oldest estate on Mont Brouilly. The sixth generation, Claude-Édouard Geoffray and his wife Sonja, lead it today: roughly 30 hectares, 8.3 of them Côte de Brouilly and 5.5 Brouilly Reverdon on pink granite. Semi-carbonic with partial destemming decided cuvée by cuvée, foudres and large casks, moderate sulfur, an organic conversion under way. Les Sept Vignes, from seven parcels, is blackcurrant and blue-stone firmness; La Chapelle comes from the steep parcel below the chapel; Marguerite is the Chardonnay. Tasting by appointment; two gîtes under the hill.
Other names you will hear: Château des Jacques, Louis Jadot’s Moulin-à-Vent estate, for single-vineyard wines; Clos de la Roilette for classic Fleurie; Jean-Claude Lapalu on the natural side of Brouilly.
What a day here looks like on tour#
We sleep in Villié-Morgon or Beaujeu, so the first cellar is ten minutes away. At 10:00 we are underground tasting a Morgon N beside a Morgon S, or one climat from two growers; the talk is sulfur, temperature and patience, not fruit adjectives. Then we walk up the Côte du Py, forty minutes between bush vines, blue stone underfoot, the Saône plain below.
Lunch is the local mâchon, properly a mid-morning meal: charcuterie, cervelas, cheese, and cru Beaujolais at 13 to 14 °C from a pot, the thick-bottomed 46 centilitre Lyon bottle. It runs into the afternoon; nobody has complained yet.
The afternoon is the classic side: south to Odenas, Thivin’s Côte de Brouilly against the morning’s Morgon, then the chapel of Notre-Dame-aux-Raisins on Mont Brouilly, built in 1857, for the view over the crus. Dinner is a bouchon in Lyon or a village restaurant: saucisson brioché, quenelles de brochet, a Fleurie, and an older Moulin-à-Vent if the list has one.
Practical#
Villié-Morgon is about 70 kilometres from Lyon Saint-Exupéry airport, an hour by car; from central Lyon 45 to 60 minutes. Inside the crus nothing is far: Fleurie is 5 kilometres up the road, Beaujeu about 8 west, Odenas about 12 south. Arbois in the Jura is 170 kilometres and 2 hours away, which is why they share a tour.
Best months: May and June for flowering and open cellars; September for the harvest, usually the first half, when many small estates take no visitors; October and November for colour and reopened cellars. August closures are common. The drink-drive limit is 0.5 g/l, so the driver does not taste, and village shops shut from 12:00 to 14:00. Every visit is by appointment, and how I prepare a group matters here: several famous cellars receive no tourists at all.
Beaujolais is half of my Jura and Beaujolais natural wine tour out of Lyon, and an easy drive south of Burgundy. For a week around the crus alone, or the harvest, ask me about a private tour.
