Winemaker Notes
This is a full, robust Beaujolais, with a fleshy, almost fat texture and greater longevity than any other Cru of the Beaujolais. Clos des Thorins has a deep garnet-red color and dense aromas of baked red and black fruits. This wine is powerful, deep and has elegant, long-lasting tannins. The exceptional quality of its structure preserves the fruitiness even when aged.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
One of the more tightly wound wines in the range is the 2019 Moulin-à-Vent Clos des Thorins, a medium to full-bodied, taut and concentrated wine evocative of plums, raspberries, rose petals, orange rind and potpourri. Built around lively acids and fine but youthfully chalky tannins, this will reward a bit of patience. In this respect, it breaks a run of unusually approachable renditions of the Clos des Thorins in recent vintages. Rating : 93+
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Wine & Spirits
Gamay in granite gives this lush and generous red, with scents of crushed roses and some barnyard notes. It’s tannic and bold with wild berry flavors that turn toward savory earthiness in the end. The wine’s substantial structure will reward a few years of aging.
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.