But Seriously: Beaujolais 2021-2023

BY NEAL MARTIN | APRIL 23, 2024

I could barely see out of the front windscreen due to the smoke—a lifetime’s passive smoking in a car journey from Lyon to Belleville. It was autumn 1997: my first foray to Beaujolais, chaperoning chain-smoking colleagues from Tokyo to discuss Nouveau-laden jumbo jets with our supplier. The mind boggles at the CO2 emissions. In most consumers’ eyes, Beaujolais was Nouveau. Absurd as it reads now, Burgundy was the wine for people who could not afford Claret. Ipso facto, what did that make Beaujolais?

Simple, easy-drinking plonk that rarely exists past the third Thursday of each November? Nay: a vestige of Gamay, a variety humiliatingly outlawed by Philippe le Hardi (boo!) in 1395, the then-Duc de Bourgogne traducing it as “bitter” and, more bizarrely, “disloyal,” thereby clearing the path for the more noble Pinot Noir.

How did that work out?

Does this look like a Beaujolais-lover to you? No. Philippe le Hardi banished plantings of Gamay in favor of Pinot Noir. Obviously, he couldn’t predict global warming back in 1395.

No wonder Gamay developed an inferiority complex, its reputation sullied by over-production and a whiff of scandal in the Nineties.

Then, to many, Beaujolais was Georges Dubœuf, whose business acumen and marketing guile meant his wines dominated supermarket aisles. Oenophiles scoffed at the idea of Beaujolais constituting serious wine.

Isn’t Gamay just Pinot Noir that refuses to grow up? Doesn’t that explain why it is rarely cultivated outside the region? Gamay is vino that makes you giggle, or ‘glouglou’ as the French onomatopoeically call it—light entertainment for undemanding palates. Wine writers should not invest time writing about such frivolous wine…

Well, count me out.

Beaujolais is much, much more than Nouveau. In these straitened times, it offers far better value than a swath of Claret and over-inflated (now slightly deflated) Burgundy. And in 1395?

Au contraire, that’s when it all went wrong for the Côte d’Or, at least to those who recognize Gamay as an underrated variety, thanks partly to its medieval excommunication.

Beaujolais was ahead of the game. Preening wine regions that once looked down their noses were about to play catch-up. Fourth-generation winemaker, scientist and palate par excellence Jules Chauvet was unwittingly mapping the future, proselytizing organic viticulture, low-intervention winemaking, minimal use of sulfur, or heaven forbid, eschewing it altogether. Many mocked such practices as quasi-voodoo rather than prescient and beneficial not just for the vine, but for vineyard workers. Chauvet had four or five willing disciples, perhaps most notably Marcel Lapierre, who adopted Chauvet’s principles in the early 1980s, long before the likes of Lalou Bize-Leroy or Anne-Claude Leflaive. Like most religions, Chauvet’s principles have since been misinterpreted and miscommunicated—as Marcel’s son, Mathieu, affirmed during our tête-à-tête—though the tenets continue to ripple throughout viticulture. Beaujolais redefined and reinvented itself as a cradle of organic, biodynamic and natural winemakers. Whatever your opinion is of those wines, they helped erode the stigma that hamstrung Beaujolais, not unlike how Swartland’s revolutionaries (and, indeed, Chauvet acolytes) altered perceptions of South Africa.