Simply as the economic revolution wouldn’t have occurred with out the steam engine and the digital age can be unthinkable with out the house laptop, our present period of wine consumption would look totally totally different with out the American wine trade’s belated discovery of Beaujolais.
The famed area north of Lyon has turn into required consuming, a necessary pillar of the modern canon of wines that helped rewrite the script about the place greatness resides. Lengthy gone are days when the area suffered below the stigma of low cost, mass-market “nouveau,” that boomer-era advertising and marketing gimmick (since repurposed as cool) that just about tanked Beaujolais’ picture for a complete era of customers.
Every time trade sorts point out Beaujolais at present, they imply cru Beaujolais—sourced from the ten name-designated villages, together with Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, and Morgon, the place probably the most well-known Beaujolais is grown. And for drinkers who got here of age amid the area’s postmodern renaissance (i.e., the early aughts), these have been the bottles that supplied the primary glimpse of how profound actual Beaujolais might be.
Not solely have been the crus billed as a discount different to Burgundy (to which collectors have been simply starting to flock), however Beaujolais was additionally the birthplace of pure wine. Often known as the Gang of 4 (although technically there have been extra of them), the band of rogue vignerons credited with kick-starting the motion within the Eighties had already been canonized as patron saints of wine’s counterculture by the point their bottles surfaced on U.S. shores. This excellent mixture of affordability, drinkability and different avenue cred remodeled Beaujolais into the emblematic wine of our instances.
Then, after all, Beaujolais bought costly. Benchmark bottles that reliably landed within the $25 vary—notably, the celebrated Morgons from Jean Foillard and Marcel Lapierre—have since doubled in value. To fill the void, consumers rushed to develop their horizons, combing the globe for different gentle, chillable reds, from Sicilian frappato to Spanish mencía to Chilean país and Piedmontese pelaverga. On this fixed hunt for the brand new, nonetheless, many ignored the standard appellations of Beaujolais (a regional designation encompassing all of Beaujolais) and Beaujolais-Villages (a particular group of 38 hillside villages clustered within the space’s north). More and more, manufacturing in these appellations is being pushed by small, usually natural-leaning growers who’re working to reclaim the potential of those unheralded corners of the area.
“We at all times discuss of the crus,” says Jean-Paul Dubost, winemaker at his household’s fourth-generation property within the up-and-coming village of Lantignié. “However in Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages there are nice terroirs as nicely, giving wines which might be extraordinarily fascinating with identities of their very own.”
With Beaujolais’ prime bottlings rapidly encroaching upon high quality wine territory, meticulously picked aside for delicate distinctions in terroir, soil kind, and manufacturing strategies, Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages present a perfect level of entry and what Eric Moorer, director of gross sales at Washington, D.C.’s Domestique Wine, calls “a ‘huge image’ sense of what Beaujolais is about as a area.”
Stylistically, that interprets to a spectrum starting from pleasant, fruit-driven wines designed for speedy enjoyment to extra concentrated, structured efforts that method cru-level complexity. With out understanding a producer’s particular person fashion, it may be tough to anticipate which a part of this continuum to count on. However with costs hardly ever exceeding $25 per bottle—after which just for cult names like Lapierre and Foillard, each of whom make wonderful variations—the outcomes hardly ever disappoint. As Moorer places it, “I battle to search out unhealthy examples of those wines.”
It’s a sentiment price protecting in thoughts the subsequent time somebody complains about that bottle of Morgon hovering at $140 on the wine listing. Whereas the worth inflation that has befallen the most important names in Beaujolais reveals no indicators of abating, there’s an upside. Not confined to the identical handful of well-known reference factors, the Beaujolais part of the common U.S. wine store has quickly expanded—and with that progress has come a brand new wave of wines that invite us to contemplate a well timed paradox: What if the Beaujolais substitutes we’ve been searching for have been below our noses this complete time?
