Winemaker Notes
The Château de Thulon in Lantignié, one of the best villages due to its hillsides and granite soil, produces a wine with a bright red color and a fresh and fruity nose. Best drunk when young, within 2 years. Wines from Beaujolais villages area was made and bottled on the Château de Thulon’s cellar.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
There are fully 27,000 bottles of Burgaud's 2018 Beaujolais-Villages Les Vignes de Lantignié, a superb wine that bursts from the glass with an expressive bouquet of cherries, mulberries, smoked meats and dark chocolate. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, layered and fleshy, with juicy acids, good concentration and a flavorful finish. This saw a mere seven days maceration, and the resulting wine represents incredible value.
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James Suckling
Some quite intense notes of ripe dark cherries and tar make a deep impression. The palate is supple with nicely crafted roundness and plenty of fresh, red and purple berries. Drink now.
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.