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| Beaujolais Blanc Jean-Paul Brun 2023 Domaine de la Grand’Cour Fleurie 2023 Julien Sunier Morgon 2021 Jean-Marc Burgaud “Corcelette” Morgon 2023 Lapierre “N” Morgon 2023 |
| Our final tasting of the year features some new vintages from old friends. Beaujolais, but zero Beaujolais nouveau, those simple-minded FOMO wines that began as a slick marketing shtick that devolved to a tic that occludes the good stuff. These wines will find a happy place at your holiday table, and I hope also in your heart.
There are any number of sentiments I might express about Beaujolais, which to me is the sort of wine that here in Los Angeles, where today it may be 85 Fahrenheit, and tomorrow morning, 48, is just pretty much the perfect adult beverage. A central observation regarding Beaujolais is that from the simplest expression up to coveted, small-parcel, cru Beaujolais, is the wines are consummate gastronomic wines. What makes them so? They typically do not hammer you with tannins, extract, and alcohol and are often delicate and fresh (although global warming is making this more of a fought value proposition) so much so that you might drink greedily without stopping for a moment to press a serviette to your lips, and then suddenly, abruptly, the bottle is finished leaving you wanting more. Another central observation if you are hip to natural wines, is that Beaujolais is where modern natural wine originates. A small group of vignerons, known as the Gang of Four (or Five, depending on who’s doing the counting), frustrated with the increasing industrialization and enshitification of the wine of their region, led by the visionary chemist and winemaker Jules Chauvet, began marching to a different drummer in the 1980s (we’re tasting wine from one of these OG domains this evening). Chauvet argued that if you want a wine to exhibit the unique flavors of its region of origin, its terroir, you should avoid using synthetic agrochemicals in your vineyards that might suppress the native yeasts and bacteria that flourish there; in addition, he argued that you should avoid adding sulfites before fermentation, as that may suppress the populations of wild yeasts and bacteria unique to the biome of each vineyard. But all these observations are, in the end, unsatisfactory. It’s like asking you to list the reasons you love your dog. You might list reasons, but in the end, the sum of these reasons never exhausts or explains the emotions. And that’s how Beaujolais works if you are susceptible to its charms. |