Winemaker Notes
Blackberry, red licorice, violet, mossy river stone, and iron on the nose. Smooth tannins with medium high acidity and medium to full body. It features flavors of blackberry, black cherry, tart unsweetened cranberry, cassis, black pepper, bramble, and violets all evolve on the palate, especially as the wine opens up.
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
Raspberry and dried orange peel play table tennis on the nose with an audience of Darjeeling tea, moist earth and dried field grass. The midpalate echoes the nose while at once channeling a red-and-black fruit mix that dances between your cheeks and doesn't let you reduce the wine to one or the other. The finish is long, complex and welcoming.
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
Morgon is one of the Cru Beaujolais appellations I always recall lasting on the palate, and the 2022 Domaine Gaget Cote du Puy Morgon stays long in the finish. This wine shows aromas and flavors of chalk, stones-in-the-desert, and mid-summer blackberries. Enjoy this wine with a savory lamb stew. (Tasted: September 29, 2024, San Francisco, CA)
-
James Suckling
Fragrant and wild nose of dried flowers, mulberries, cherries and licorice. It’s ripe, juicy and supple, with a medium body and silky tannins. Long and delicious.
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.