At 09:30 on the first Tuesday of June it was already 24 °C in the yard at Domaine Marcel Lapierre, and by 09:40, three steps inside the cellar door, I was wishing I had brought a jumper. The Lapierres keep their cellar cold as a matter of method, not comfort, and that change in the air is the first thing every guest notices. Villié-Morgon sits in the granite north of Beaujolais, an hour from Lyon in eastern France, under the dark hump of the Côte du Py. It is a small village with a large argument attached: modern natural wine was worked out here in practice, vat by vat, from 1981.
Mathieu and Camille Lapierre met us in the yard, and we went straight in out of the sun.
A century in one village, and 1981#
Michel Lapierre founded the domaine in 1909. Marcel Lapierre took it over in 1973, at 23, and for a few years made wine the way the village made it. Then he met Jules Chauvet. Chauvet (1907–1989) was a chemist and négociant at La Chapelle-de-Guinchay, a short drive north, who had spent decades working out how a wine could ferment cleanly on its own yeasts without the sulfur dioxide everyone else added as insurance. In 1981 Marcel put the theory into a vat: no added sulfur, no commercial yeast, no chemical fertiliser in the vines.
Jean Foillard, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet, neighbours in Villié-Morgon and Régnié, followed him down the same road, and their American importer Kermit Lynch called them the gang of four. The name stuck, and so did the method.
Marcel died on 11 October 2010. Mathieu had joined him in the mid-2000s; Camille came in 2013; the two of them run the domaine today with their mother Marie. There are about 18 hectares of Gamay, certified organic, on the Côte du Py, at Corcelette and in other Morgon lieux-dits, plus some Beaujolais-Villages.
I came to the wines sideways. The first bottle of Lapierre Morgon I opened for a table in Brno, a good many years ago, split the room in two: two guests asked for something else and four asked me to write down the name. That argument is still the most useful thing I know about natural wine, and the reason I bring groups here.
Whole bunches, small crates, cold air#
Almost every cellar in the crus uses some version of whole-bunch semi-carbonic maceration. Uncrushed clusters go into the vat; the bunches at the bottom split under their own weight and start to ferment; the carbon dioxide they give off blankets the rest; and inside the intact berries a slow fermentation begins without any yeast at all. Run short and warm, it gives the banana note of a Nouveau. What the Lapierres do is run it cold and long.
The harvest is by hand into small crates, so the bunches arrive whole and unbruised. The fruit goes into the vats chilled and the cellar stays cold, so the maceration takes two to three weeks rather than a few days. Cold is the whole idea: it slows everything down, keeps the perfume inside the berry and lets the native yeasts settle in before anything else can. No yeast is added and no sugar; there is no chaptalisation. Afterwards the wine goes into old Burgundy barrels: air and time, no taste of oak worth mentioning.
Mathieu stopped us at the sorting table, stacked against the wall until September.
“We add nothing, so there is nothing we can correct later,” he said. “That is why the sorting table is the most important tool in the building.”
Camille added the other half: a cold cellar is only cold if somebody checks it every day, and the work of a cellar like this is mostly attention, not intervention.
N and S: one Morgon, two bottlings#
The domaine’s Morgon comes in two versions with a small letter on the label. N is bottled with no added sulfur at all. S has a small dose added at bottling. Same vines, same crates, same vats, same barrels, same people; the difference comes at bottling. Tasting them side by side is the best twenty-minute lesson in what sulfur actually does in a glass that I know.
What you notice is not that one is good and the other is not. On the day, the N is a shade more open, the fruit a little louder; the S is a shade tighter and more precise, as if somebody had focused the lens by a quarter-turn. Both are recognisably the same wine, which is the lesson. Guests who arrive certain about sulfur, in either direction, tend to leave less certain, and that is a good day’s work for a sommelier.
One glass: Morgon N 2023#
We tasted standing among the barrels, the bottles straight from the cold.
Then the rest of the table. Raisins Gaulois, the Vin de France the family makes to be drunk cold, which we did; it is the bottle I reach for when someone tells me they do not like red wine in summer. Château Cambon, a Beaujolais from the estate the Lapierres own with Jean-Claude Chanudet. And, because one was open, the Cuvée Marcel Lapierre, from the oldest vines and only in the years that deserve it: the same silk, a longer conversation.
The mâchon at 11:30#
By late morning the sun had found the yard and we walked into the village for the mâchon, the Beaujolais second breakfast that does the work of lunch. A café off the square, a long table, and the things the region eats with its wine: rosette de Lyon, cervelas, a terrine with a crust, a soft cow’s-milk cheese, bread. The wine came in a pot, the thick-bottomed 46 cl Lyon bottle, and it was Morgon at 13 to 14 °C, the temperature the crus are drunk at here and almost nowhere else.
We talked about hail, the recurring worry on this slope, about the harvest date, and about how many crates a small team can carry up the Py in a day. Nobody talked about scores.
Lapierre on tour#
On my Jura and Beaujolais natural wine tour, the domaine is the first stop on day five, at 09:30, five minutes from the guesthouse where we sleep in Villié-Morgon. The morning is the cellar and the N beside the S; the mâchon follows; the afternoon is a second Morgon cellar, so the same hill can be heard in a different accent. Tastings are by appointment, which I arrange well ahead, and I ask guests to spit more than they would like at that hour.
The idea also reaches my Burgundy and Champagne classics week, some 130 kilometres north. Philippe Pacalet, Marcel’s nephew, carried whole bunches and low sulfur into the Côte d’Or, and Fanny Sabre, whose Pommard cellar we visit, trained beside him. Guests who have stood in this cold room recognise the thinking in Pommard at once.
Bring a jumper, even in June. Especially in June.
We came out into 27 °C at a quarter past one, and the heat felt like an argument the cellar had already won.
