Château Thivin sits in Odenas at the foot of Mont Brouilly, and from the yard the hill fills the sky: 484 metres of old volcanic rock with a chapel on top and vines on every flank. I arrived at 09:00 on a June morning with the Saône plain already hazy. Claude-Édouard Geoffray had a piece of the hill in his hand and gave it to me before he said good morning. Blue-grey, heavy, cold, rust along one edge. This is the Côte de Brouilly, in the Beaujolais of eastern France, and the stone is most of the story.
Six generations at the foot of the hill#
Zaccharie Geoffray and Marguerite Bernard bought the château and just under two hectares of vines at auction on 8 June 1877. The family had grown vines since 1743, and Thivin is the oldest estate on Mont Brouilly. My visit fell three days short of the 148th anniversary of that auction, which nobody had planned.
The estate today is about 30 hectares. The heart is 8.3 hectares of Côte de Brouilly on the east, south and south-west flanks of the hill; below it, 5.5 hectares of Brouilly on the pink granite of Reverdon, and some Beaujolais-Villages. Claude-Édouard, trained in viticulture and oenology, and his wife Sonja, who looks after the vineyards and the selling, lead the sixth generation. The estate calls itself a château on a human scale, and the phrase holds. Between the gate and the cellar door I met three people and one tractor.
I first met the wine in a Lyon bouchon, in my kitchen years, when the patron had run out of Morgon and poured a Côte de Brouilly with eight years on it instead. It had gone dark and quiet, iron and dried cherry, and I wrote the name on a napkin. It was Thivin.
Blue stone: why Gamay is different on Mont Brouilly#
Most of the ten crus stand on pink granite that weathers into gore, a coarse sand that drains fast and gives Gamay its perfume and its lightness. Mont Brouilly is the clearest exception; the Côte du Py in Morgon shares some of the same rock. The hill is blue diorite, pierre bleue to the growers, and it breaks down into what they call roche pourrie, rotten rock. Gamay on it comes out darker and firmer, with an iron edge, and wants a few years in bottle. Côte de Brouilly has been an appellation since 1938, drawn around the slopes of the hill itself; Brouilly, the larger cru, wraps around the base.
We drove up the track and walked the last part to the parcel under Notre-Dame-aux-Raisins, the chapel of 1857 on the summit. That parcel is La Chapelle, and it is steep enough that you keep one hand near the ground. The vines were a week from flowering. Between the rows the soil was blue rubble with a thin skin of grass; Claude-Édouard crumbled a handful to show me what rotten means here.
“On this hill the stone gives the structure,” he said. “Our job in the cellar is not to add more of it.”
Whole bunches, foudres and a measured dose of sulfur#
The harvest is by hand. The cellar works in the regional grammar, semi-carbonic maceration of whole bunches, with one adjustment: part of the fruit is destemmed, and how much is decided cuvée by cuvée and year by year rather than by rule. From the vats the wine goes into foudres and large old casks, oak of several thousand litres that gives the wine air rather than flavour. Sulfur is used in the classic way, a moderate dose at the moments a classic cellar uses it. That is the point of the visit, not a footnote to it.
The vineyards are in conversion to organic farming. Claude-Édouard talked about it as work in the rows, more hours per hectare, and left it there.
Twenty minutes north, in Villié-Morgon, the Lapierre family bottles a Morgon with no added sulfur. I pour the two side by side and let the glasses argue; I have set out what I pour and why elsewhere. Odenas is where the classic side of the argument is easiest to make, because the wine ages.
One glass: Les Sept Vignes 2022#
We tasted in the cellar at 14 °C. Marguerite first, the Beaujolais-Villages Blanc from Chardonnay: white peach and a chalky finish. Then Brouilly Reverdon from the pink granite below the hill: raspberry, white pepper, light on its feet, the Beaujolais everyone recognises. Then the hill.
La Chapelle followed, from the steep parcel we had just climbed: tighter, more stone than fruit, the one I would slip into a blind line-up beside a village Burgundy. Then Cuvée Zaccharie, a selection of old vines that carries the founder’s name, darker and denser and in no hurry. Godefroy, from an east-facing lieu-dit, and Clos Bertrand complete the Côte de Brouilly range.
The mâchon under the foudres#
At 11:00 Sonja set a board on an upturned barrel. This was the mâchon, the Beaujolais second breakfast that does the work of lunch: rosette de Lyon, cervelas, a Saint-Marcellin at the point of running, bread, and a pot, the 46 cl bottle of the Lyon bouchons, filled with Reverdon and chilled to 13 °C. A bowl of the first cherries. We talked about hail, the standing worry of the crus in June and July, about which parcels on the hill flower first, and about where in Lyon a guest should eat quenelles. Claude-Édouard answers technical questions in full sentences; Sonja knows the addresses.
Thivin on tour#
On my Jura and Beaujolais natural wine tour, Odenas is day six and the classic answer to the week: two Morgon cellars run as cold rooms the day before, then Thivin’s foudres the next morning. After the cellar we climb 45 minutes through the vines to the chapel at 484 metres and eat at the top, looking back over the crus to the Saône. Tastings are by appointment, which I arrange, and the château sells at the door. It also lets two gîtes under the hill, Le Pré Roy and Zaccharie, for 15 guests each, which a private group may want to know.
Guests on the Burgundy and Champagne classics tour never come this far south. But somewhere in the Burgundy days, over a Pommard, somebody asks what the grape Philip the Bold banned from Burgundy in 1395 does on a hill of its own. I carry a Sept Vignes for that question.
Odenas is 45 to 60 minutes north of Lyon and about an hour from the airport. Bring shoes with grip for La Chapelle. During the harvest, from late August into September, I keep groups on the hill and out of the cellar.
I kept the piece of stone. It sits on my desk in Brno, and it weighs more than it looks, which is also true of the wine.
