Bountifil Beaujolais

If red wines of character are your thing and the warm summer months don’t always appear conducive to your enjoyment of them, then we ask you, is there a more suitable, more vibrantly-flavoured and remarkable red wine for the job than modern day Beaujolais?

Here we have the great pleasure of presenting a mixed case containing two beautifully expressive and masterfully balanced Beaujolais wines from the peerless Jean-Claude Lapalu. I had the opportunity to taste with the great man himself at the domain on a recent trip to France. Under the dappled shade of a large tree in Jean-Claude’s back garden, surrounded by a panoramic of endless vineyards, we tasted his wines in the heat of the midday sun – a setting that perfectly framed the essence of Beaujolais at its finest. The experience brought into focus the singular beauty of Lapalu’s wines: characterful and complex, yet marked by a striking purity. Each glass was as bright, vibrant and almost impossibly refreshing as the last – an undeniable expression of the brilliance of Beaujolais when crafted with such integrity and finesse. They also proved to be a perfect complement to the wide variety of cheese, charcuterie and other delicacies, that Jean-Claude so kindly prepared for us.

The Bountiful Beaujolais case contains 3 bottles each of the following wines –

2022 Brouilly Croix de Rameaux
From 80 year old vines on steep, westerly facing vineyards in which the grapes ripen slowly in the evening sun, this wine is known as one of Lapalu’s most “lavish and sun-kissed”. Freshly harvested grapes are left to naturally cool in crate for 24 hours within the winery prior to undergoing whole-bunch fermentation for 3 weeks. The wine is then aged 8-9 months in large 3-5 year old oak barrels. The result is a wonderfully rich and rounded, but fresh wine showing aromas of dark cherries, ripe plums and mulberries. The palate displays concentrated flavours of macerated cherries, prunes and hints of sweet spice, whilst the generous and ample structure of the wines is adroitly balanced out by luscious freshness and acidity.

2022 Côte de Brouilly
Sourced from 50 year old vines on the clay and limestone-rich soils of the northerly facing slopes of the Mont de Brouilly, this wine undergoes 10 days of semi-carbonic maceration with 80% whole bunches and 10% destemmed. Following on from its fermentation in tank, the wine is aged for 10 months in old oak barrels. The nose is of macerated, confit dark fruits with the palate displaying exuberant flavours of blueberries and ripe, black and sour cherries. The refreshing, juicy acidity and flinty, smokey minerality combine to give the wine a beautiful purity, focus and poise.

At one time, and due in large part to its association with the overtly youthful and fruity Beaujolais Nouveau, Beaujolais wine was often maligned, dismissed even, for being overly light, simple and more-or-less incapable of anything approaching complexity.

Over the past few decades, however, a select group of Beaujolais producers have set about fomenting a dynamic renaissance in the region, demonstrating how, with care, attention and judiciously-applied techniques in both the vineyard and winery, the hallowed combination of Gamay grape, granite-rich soils and minimal intervention winemaking is capable of producing wines as characterful and complex as they are profound.

At the forefront of this winemaking revolution is the man known as the “Boss of Brouilly”, Jean-Claude Lapalu.

Upon inheriting the family domain in the early 1990s, Jean-Claude’s naturally inquisitive nature compelled him to question and revise a lot of what he had been taught at winemaking school, particularly the generally accepted conventional wisdom of the time concerning the application of pesticides and herbicides within the vineyard and the use of cultured yeasts and heavy doses of sulphur in the winery. His decision to reverse the family tradition of selling the domain’s grapes to the local cooperative and to bottle his own wines, was also fundamental in allowing him to apply the techniques and practices that would ultimately lead to the domain achieving Organic certification in 2010 and to Jean-Claude himself becoming a leading light in the Natural Wine-making scene.

Today, Jean-Claude presides over 9 hectares of old vines (60-80 years old) stretching from the Mont de Brouilly down to his home village of Saint-Etienne-la-Varenne, all farmed according to Biodynamic principles. Grapes are hand-harvested and left to chill naturally for 24 hours prior to fermentation, which involves either full or semi-carbonic maceration, with a range of ageing vessels ranging from oak barrels to concrete vats used according to the desired style. Jean-Claude uses little or no sulphur throughout the winemaking process, but is not dogmatic on the point. His aim is, in his own words, to make “natural wines that are correct”.

And what incredible wines they are! Through years of experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, Jean-Claude has developed his own particular brand of Beaujolais. One that is, at the same time, bursting with structure and concentration, but nuanced and elegant. His wines never fail to display the perfect combination of power, freshness and elegance and are a true testament to his relentless pursuit of the ideal that “the wine should be nourished by the nature that surrounds it”.