Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This powerful rich wine is finely structured and concentrated. It has weight from solid tannins that contrast with the high tones of the ripe red-cherry fruits. From a single parcel, this cru wine is dense, both firm and fresh. Drink from late 2017.Cellar Selection
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Tasting Panel
Brilliant magenta. Lively, highly perfumed aromas of black raspberry, spicecake and candied flowers pick up a minerally quality as the wine opens up. Silky and energetic in the mouth, offering sappy, concentrated red and blue fruit flavors that show very good clarity and spicy lift. Red fruit and lavender notes linger on the impressively persistent finish, which is given shape by smooth tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
With bottle age, the 2015 Juliénas Beauvernay has actually fared better than its Fleurie counterpart. Bursting with aromas of sweet berries, plums, licorice and soil, it's medium to full-bodied, velvety and charming, with fine tannins and succulent acids. This is showing well today.
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.