Winemaker Notes
Pairs well with duck, squab and other poultry, especially in a thick plum sauce, and strong cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
What a beautiful nose of red fruits, summer flowers, spice and blood orange this Morgon has! Concentrated, elegant and precise on the medium-bodied palate, this has so much vitality and very good aging potential. Moderately dry tannins and vanilla at the long finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Morgon Côte du Py is a standout effort from Château des Jacques in this more-challenging vintage, offering up flavors of tangy currants, cherries, sweet soil, cacao powder and cedar. Vibrant and layered, with a velvety concentration of fruit framed by smooth, powdery tannins, it's medium to full-bodied, gliding leisurely across the palate, culminating in a lingering, satisfying finish. Suave and intricately layered, this wine comes highly recommended.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine opens with muddled rose petal, black cherry, hibiscus and boysenberry. Velvety in texture, it bathes in concentrated black fruit on the midpalate with an undercurrent of grippy tannins. The wine reveals the subtleties that a cool vintage can provide.
Delightfully playful, but also capable of impressive gravitas, Gamay is responsible for juicy, berry-packed wines. From Beaujolais, Gamay generally has three classes: Beaujolais Nouveau, a decidedly young, fruit-driven wine, Beaujolais Villages and Cru Beaujolais. The Villages and Crus are highly ranked grape growing communes whose wines are capable of improving with age whereas Nouveau, released two months after harvest, is intended for immediate consumption. Somm Secret—The ten different Crus have their own distinct personalities—Fleurie is delicate and floral, Côte de Brouilly is concentrated and elegant and Morgon is structured and age-worthy.
The bucolic region often identified as the southern part of Burgundy, Beaujolais actually doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the rest of the region in terms of climate, soil types and grape varieties. Beaujolais achieves its own identity with variations on style of one grape, Gamay.
Gamay was actually grown throughout all of Burgundy until 1395 when the Duke of Burgundy banished it south, making room for Pinot Noir to inhabit all of the “superior” hillsides of Burgundy proper. This was good news for Gamay as it produces a much better wine in the granitic soils of Beaujolais, compared with the limestone escarpments of the Côte d’Or.
Four styles of Beaujolais wines exist. The simplest, and one that has regrettably given the region a subpar reputation, is Beaujolais Nouveau. This is the Beaujolais wine that is made using carbonic maceration (a quick fermentation that results in sweet aromas) and is released on the third Thursday of November in the same year as harvest. It's meant to drink young and is flirty, fruity and fun. The rest of Beaujolais is where the serious wines are found. Aside from the wines simply labelled, Beaujolais, there are the Beaujolais-Villages wines, which must come from the hilly northern part of the region, and offer reasonable values with some gems among them. The superior sections are the cru vineyards coming from ten distinct communes: St-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Regnié, Brouilly, and Côte de Brouilly. Any cru Beajolais will have its commune name prominent on the label.