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| Château Cambon Pét-nat Vin de France NV Marie Bererd Bourgogne Blanc 2022 Dubost Beaujolais-Lantignié 2023 Château de Javernand “Indigène” Chiroubles 2023 Jean Foillard “Côte du Py” Morgon 2023 |
| It feels strange to invite you to a tasting at the shop, with all the bad news this week—it’s all hitting me hard, and I know I’m not the only one. But I also know we can all use an opportunity to switch it off, turn on, tune in, and drop out, if only for a few blissful moments. And what better way to do this, in the heat of late spring in Los Angeles, than tasting a few samples from that eternal spring of spiritual refreshment: Beaujolais. No, none of that dreadful, soul-sapping industrial dreck, but the real stuff, ranging from the simplest yet deeply satisfying vins de soif reds, meant to serve chilled, to an acid-driven white wine made from chardonnay, a thousand miles off center from nearly any domestic manifestation, to complex, dark, and brooding red wines born from strands of volcanic soil. And, if you care about such things, the Beaujolais region is also where modern, natural wine was born (we’ll be tasting an example from one of the vignerons responsible for this, Jean Foillard).
The nucleus of Beaujolais is the gamay grape, the only red grape permitted in the region. A grape of such radical, lunatic nature, so criminal, that in the 14th century the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, stamped his foot and angrily proclaimed it an “evil and disloyal plant,” and through royal decree, demanded it “extirpated, destroyed and reduced to nothing.” And just like that, Burgundy proper became a near monoculture of pinot noir for red wine, with gamay only permitted in the southern limits of the kingdom, the New Jersey of Burgundy, where it took hold and, in seeming defiance of Philip, flourishes to this day. We can speculate as to why Philip so despised gamay. Taking out Occam’s razor, the simplest and likely best explanation is that it’s easy to overcrop gamay. In contrast, pinot is a notoriously difficult beast, producing a meager crop even in the best vintages, making it more precious through forced scarcity. We’re tasting Beaujolais from the south of the region to the north. Limestone soils are predominant in the south, whereas the north is mostly granite, with various other minerals including quartz, schist, and basalt, all of which provide different expressions. We’re starting with some fizz from the storied Château Cambon, and then a bone dry, mineral white labelled Bourgogne blanc, as a vigneronne may designate such wine as either Beaujolais blanc, or Bourgogne. And then a trio of reds starting with a newly named “village” level wine that falls outside official cru boundaries, yet shares the same granitic soil, followed by two cru wines: one a Chiroubles, again, granitic soils, but here with cooling altitude for more freshness, the other a Morgon from volcanic, basaltic soils. |