Winemaker Notes
The deep red color of the wine offers the first hint of its massive concentration. The nose is an explosion of red fruit, with roasted and spicy (pepper and saffron) notes. A full-bodied wine of considerable elegance, lively tannins and superb length, with a mineral finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A small harvest because of hail has produced this richly concentrated wine. Dense tannins and impressive black fruits are layered with acidity and a tensely structured character. The wine should be aged further to reveal its full panoply of flavors. Drink from 2022.
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Wine & Spirits
This grows at an eight-acre parcel at the base of the hill in Thorins, where the soil is deeper and holds more water than in the vineyards on the slope. While hail severely cut back the 2017 crop, the fruit that remained created a formidable wine. It cascades with fruit up front, before the tannins tighten around all that floral intensity. Then, with air, it opens further, yielding scents of figs, plums and strawberries, still tight, but the racy fruit flavors last. Decant the bottle if you open it now, to serve with roast squab and wild mushrooms.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
There are some 2,000 bottles of the 2017 Moulin-à-Vent Champ de Cour, one of the lieux-dits that was least impacted by the year's hail storms. Revealing aromas of cherries, dark berry fruit, candied peel and vanilla pod, it's full-bodied, layered and chewy, with firm tannins and an oak-inflected finish. There's clearly serious raw material here and thoughtful vilification, too, but I can't help feeling that the wine's fruit is somewhat surpassed on the palate by the supplemental oak phenolics. In short, the question is whether this Moulin-à-Vent will ever become truly charming? My score gives it the benefit of the doubt, but the cuvée's track record suggests that's optimistic.
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.