Winemaker Notes
Deep crimson robe with purple tints. Quite intense and delicate. A very floral bouquet with spicy notes. Full and generous, the fruit is intense, lively, and sappy. Blackcurrant, redcurrant and the North American black raspberry or black cap are at the fore with a touch of vanilla, long at the end.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Fleurie Garants is a warmer, southwest-facing site, and its bouquet is correspondingly richer and more sun-kissed than that of Chermette’s Poncié, exhibiting notes of ripe, plummy fruit, rich spices and subtle hints of loamy soil. On the palate, it’s medium to full-bodied, ample and expansive, with a generous core of fruit, framed by fine tannins.
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James Suckling
A deep and spicy expression of Fleurie with impressive complexity already. The palate has a lithe, juicy and layered style with fresh, fine-grained tannins, holding long and fresh. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
This oak-aged wine is smoothly textured, full of ripe black fruits. Spice as well as the layer of tannins give richness. Black cherries and berries add depth to the wine that is likely to age well. Drink from 2020.
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.