Small Is Big In Beaujolais
Where to find the region’s best values (hint: underrated crus and declassified wines). Plus, 21 bottle recommendations.
From a dusty overlook on the side of the road, across the street from a touristy little cafe on a steep hill in Chiroubles, I could see all of Beaujolais in a stunning panoramic view beneath blue skies and an intense midsummer sun. Facing southeast, I spotted the crus of Juliénas and Saint-Amour to my far left. Régnié was to the right, with Côte de Brouilly, on the slopes of a dormant volcano, straight ahead in the mid-distance. The flat land of the south stretched into the distance behind it. Lyon was somewhere behind the hills on the horizon.
South of Chiroubles is the cru of Morgon, and I could see Moulin-à-Vent to the east. These two crus are considered to produce the most important and famous Beaujolais wines. But it’s Fleurie, sandwiched between the two, that has the deepest bench of winemaking talent in the region. The most elegant, concentrated wines that I tasted during my time in Beaujolais this summer came from that cru, but I also saw incredible potential in the largely overlooked crus of Chiroubles and Régnié. And it’s Beaujolais-Villages wines from small-scale producers that offer some of the best values in the region right now, especially when they are sourced from declassified cru vines.
Most consumers are familiar with the standard narrative of Beaujolais, but here’s a refresher. About a quarter of wine production in Beaujolais is labeled with one of the ten cru appellations, the top of the quality hierarchy in the region. The crus are on the predominantly granite hills in the north, and the flat south is on limestone soils. The crus of Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent are known for the most powerful, ageworthy wines in Beaujolais, while Fleurie is known for light, fragrant wines (the name doesn’t have anything to do with the floral profile of the wines). The rest of the crus tend to be passed over, or oversimplified as fruity, structured, or somewhere in between. At the other end of the spectrum, much of simple Beaujolais AOC comes from the south, making the cheapest, fruitiest wines, and Beaujolais-Villages is typically a cut above that in quality.
The region is still nursing a tutti frutti hangover from its Beaujolais Nouveau bender that started in the 1980s. That same decade, winemakers Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton—importer Kermit Lynch’s “Gang of Four”—kickstarted a new wave of winemaking in the region (and in France) by eschewing sulfur, fertilizer, chaptalization, and cultured yeasts. You might be tempted, looking at the carefully curated shelf of a New York City wine shop, to think that this low-intervention, organic, small-production winemaking is the new norm in Beaujolais, but it is still very much the exception.
One of the latest developments in the region is that the appellations are getting behind the vigneron-led rise in site-specific bottlings. Fleurie is leading the way: in 2023, the cru’s leadership moved to secure premier cru designations for seven lieux-dits (specific named plots made of one or more parcels of vines). That won’t happen for several years, as approvals are pending with the INAO (the French regulatory body for appellations), but renowned vineyards like La Madone and La Roilette will be premier crus in the future. Brouilly and Moulin-à-Vent followed in filing applications.
I was in Beaujolais earlier this summer, and met with some relative newcomers to the region. Michele and David Chapel had their first vintage in 2016, and Domaine Chapel now farms seven hectares of vines across Beaujolais, including a two-hectare parcel in Fleurie called Charbonnières. From the steep slopes of the vineyard, you can see the little chapel that sits at the top of La Madone in the distance. When we arrived, David Chapel was plowing the vineyard with a new tractor, and we walked through the rows, stepping carefully and watching for vipers, which like to coil up near the trunk of the vines.
When Domaine Chapel took over this vineyard, it was already fully organic—actually a rarity for Beaujolais, despite the prevalent narrative. It’s still quite radical to practice organic viticulture there: only a small percentage of the region is farmed that way. "It's changing slowly, but overall it's very difficult to be organic in Beaujolais," Michele said. “You farm organically here because you believe in it.” Many grape growers still use herbicides and sell grapes to négociants for the best price.
Organic viticulture is difficult in Beaujolais partly because the vines are pruned as traditional gobelet (bush vines), at 10,000 vines per hectare. It’s difficult to work in such narrow rows where grass grows tall. Plus, a whopping 96 percent of the region is planted to gamay. A dense monovarietal planting means that disease pressure is high.
The Charbonnières plot we walked through was worked in fermage (a farming tenancy) by winemaker Julien Sunier before Michele and David took it over. I happened to visit Sunier that morning, at his winery up on a high slope in the village of Avenas.
Sunier’s parents were hairdressers in Dijon. He spent lots of time in their shop growing up, and has an unstudied ability to make anyone feel instantly welcome and at ease in his company. We sipped espresso on his terrace, taking in the view to the west, and he told me about how he came to Beaujolais. He worked in various winemaking jobs around the world before landing a position here, making wine—in a vastly different way than he does now—for Mommessin, a négociant owned by Boisset (one of France’s largest wine groups). He started his own domaine in 2008 and now farms nine and half hectares in Fleurie, Régnié, and Morgon.
Sunier converted an old farm on the slope into his winery and cellar. His winery is unusual: it’s an open-air shed, that he calls a “climatic winery,” cooled by the altitude, the surrounding forest, and northerly winds. “In 2013, it was snowing here when I was vinifying in October!” he told me. “The maceration was very long and cold. And then some years it's crazy hot and you have to press the grapes after only eight days, and it's another style of wine.”
Sunier farms organically, and uses wild yeasts and carbonic maceration, with fermentation finishing in wood for well-integrated oak. The wine is moved from the press, to concrete tanks, to barrel and foudre with the aid of gravity alone. The wines see only half a gram of sulfur at bottling. They’re clean, juicy, and inviting. This winemaking is about as far as you can get from so much of Beaujolais production, that still uses cultured yeasts, thermovinification, heavy hits of sulfur, and other grotesqueries to make an end product that’s about as processed as Coca-Cola. The French like their cheap wine, and Beaujolais still makes a lot of it.
Beyond Sunier and Domaine Chapel, other notable producers making wines from vines in Fleurie are Yvon Métras, Marc Delienne, and Anne-Sophie Dubois. But many new-wave vignerons in Beaujolais farm parcels in more than just one cru. Domaine Chapel has vines in Chiroubles and Régnié as well. Michele drove us down winding roads to a plot of the domaine’s young vines in Chiroubles. (I will be forever grateful to her for teaching me that in rural areas in France, traffic entering a road from the right usually has the right-of-way. Suddenly all the exasperated gestures I’d seen from other drivers as I blew past them made perfect sense.)
The plot in Chiroubles is located directly across a narrow rural road from the Morgon cru. These vines are at an elevation of about 460 meters, on steep slopes. Chiroubles is the highest altitude of all the appellations in Beaujolais, as high as 600 meters of elevation. The grapes take longer to ripen there, and the wines have a crisp acidity. This cru, wedged between Fleurie and Morgon, might not be very well-known now, but its altitude could give it an edge with climate change. The wines I tried were juicy and bright, but with surprising complexity and structure. Jules Métras (son of Yvon) also farms parcels in Chiroubles, including a plot of old vines at the very top of the appellation. Domaine de la Grosse Pierre is a newer estate run by Pauline Passot since 2018. Her family is from Chiroubles, and she left her job as a sommelier to return and make wine here.
Beyond Fleurie, Julien Sunier also has plots in Régnié, another underrated cru with incredible potential and great value. Located west of Morgon, Régnié has only been a cru since 1988, which might help explain its underdog status. From grapes grown on pink granite soils, there’s a distinct minerality in these wines, wrapped up in juicy red fruit. Sunier’s younger brother Antoine Sunier also makes wine in Beaujolais—expressive and energetic wines from Régnié. Philippe Viet is another vigneron crafting impressive wines in this cru (as well as Fleurie and Morgon); his Régnié bottlings are elegant and lifted, from a plot at some 450 meters of elevation.
Domaine Chapel also has parcels in Régnié, and included declassified vines from the cru in their 2024 Beaujolais-Villages. Beaujolais-Villages is an entry point for consumers to a lot of domaines—a “bistro wine” that hits that sweet spot between very affordable and very tasty. As Michele put it, “the wine you sell the most of needs to be good.”
The potential for Beaujolais-Villages became most clear to me during my visit to Domaine des Jeunes Pousses in the village of Emeringes, near the Chénas cru. This domaine is an incubator for young winemakers in Beaujolais, a project of vigneron Thibault Liger-Belair and investor Ivan Massonnat. The project gives winemakers control of organically farmed vineyards in Beaujolais for a period of three years, to run the estate and make wine before transferring it to the next crop of jeune pousses (“young shoots”). I visited the domaine just as the third generation of winemakers, Naïs Lombard and Olivier Cossec, were taking over operations from the second generation, Thaïs Lamy and Juliette Lumeau. The project’s vines are on predominantly clay soils, and the resulting wines had a distinct freshness—very different from those wines from granite.
One vigneron that I spoke with told me that prices for vineyards can be as high as $120,000 per hectare in a place like Moulin-à-Vent, but as low as $12,000 to $15,000 for Beaujolais-Villages. At such an attractive price point, the Beaujolais-Villages appellation is an opportunity for younger winemakers with new ideas coming to the region. Plus, not just reds but also white and rosé can be bottled under the appellation. (Cru bottlings are restricted to red wines from gamay.)
Julien Sunier declassifies his young vines in Régnié for his Wild Soul Beaujolais-Villages cuvée. He wondered if perhaps the name “Beaujolais-Villages” reminds consumers too much of “Beaujolais Nouveau” and conjures similar assumptions about quality. “But it's like Bourgogne Village—it can be awesome, it can be just perfect,” he said.
Harvest has now begun in Beaujolais; Domaine Chapel began picking their grapes this week. The growing season was warm, but mercifully, uneventful. “But until the end, you never know,” Sunier warned. 2024 was (for many French wine regions) a very bad year. Lamy of Domaine des Jeunes Pousses recalled only seven days in May without rain, which led to black rot and excessive grass growth that made it difficult to get into the vines with the tractor. And with hail storms at the end of June, the project lost two-thirds of its production in a matter of three days. A lot of grape growers dropped their organic certification after that season.
But domaines like Jeunes Pousses persist: the project just began a new partnership with a landowner to convert a plot of vines to organic. “It’s a victory for us to know that there's going to be one hectare more that is saved,” said Lamy.
Even with an increase in prices that we can anticipate with tariffs, Beaujolais still has some of the best values in wine—maybe even the best. Seeking out wines from producers like those mentioned in this report—who are living in the region and farming organically, buying vineyards and converting them to organic, changing the region for the better—is not just seizing on that value, but supporting their potential, too.
21 Beaujolais Bangers
Many of the 2023 wines (and the 2024 Beaujolais-Villages) below are arriving in the U.S., and the 2022s are still available.
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