Winemaker Notes
#91 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2024
The best parcels on the hill go into this cuvée, while the rest go into his excellent Morgon blend.
Year in and year out, this wine astounds with its beautiful cherry fruit seasoned with some earth and spice. Firm, ripe tannins back up the voluptuous fruit to make for a delicious wine that drinks well young, but will age with the best that Burgundy has to offer.
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
Welcome to the dark side of the Morgon force! Really concentrated, but with great mineral freshness, the fine tannins giving it excellent complexity on the medium-bodied palate. Just a hint of bitter chocolate at the vibrant and super-long wet-stone finish. Matured 80% in tank and 20% in wooden casks. Drinkable now, but best from 2025.
-
Wine Enthusiast
This Morgon from Côte du Py has structure grounded in restraint. The wine opens with black plum and raspberry backed by spring forest floor and subtle, black-tea aromas. Silky in texture, the wine reveals complex layers of fruit with some dried field-herb notes on the finish.
-
Wine Spectator
This offers power and structure, with a rich core of blackberry flanked by notes of warm spices, refreshing mint and grilled apple wood. Cooling river stone minerality washes through the finish, which is focused and slightly chewy. Drink now through 2028.
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.