Winemaker Notes
Anita owns a plot of old vines in Morgon’s Château-Gaillard vineyard, situated at 250 meters altitude and exposed to the south and southeast, with relatively poor soils of friable quartz. Fermented with a combination of whole clusters and destemmed berries, this cuvée is aged 80% in cement and 20% in used Burgundy barrels—an elevage well suited to this terroir’s tendency toward richness. Anita perfectly checks that richness, creating a wine of deep, dark fruit, subtle salinity, and a clean, soaring finish.
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
So ripe and so graceful, this is a staggering wine for 2021 that shows what was possible if you had old vines, you did everything right in the vineyard during the growing season, and then you hit the ideal harvest date. The balance of concentration and the super-fine tannins must be tasted to be believed. And the stony minerality at the finish is off the scale.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Still young and bursting with red fruits, this wine comes from one of the top regions of Morgon. It is structured and will be well textured as it matures. Drink from 2025.
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.