2023 Morgon Côte du Py

Louis-Claude Desvignes is another producer in Villié-Morgon who is cruising at high altitudes. As usual, I met Louis-Benoît Desvignes and his sister, Claude-Emmanuelle, at the winery and tasted in their freezing-cold barrel room. I usually taste the most recent vintage in barrel plus random older vintages at this address. “The 2024 vintage was double the amount of work because of the rain, close to 1,100 mm, around 300-400 mm more than usual,” Louis-Benoît explains. “I think it was a little better [in Beaujolais] than in the Loire and Champagne. The biggest difficulty was finding windows to treat the vines, and the soils were hard to work. But we harvested a little more than 30 hl/ha in the end, which is a small victory. We learned from the 2021 vintage when it comes to the 2024.” This was an impressive line-up from Desvignes that reached its zenith with their stunning L’Impénitents bottling, another wine that testifies to the longevity that top Beaujolais wines derive from their enviable parcels of ancient vines.

Louis Claude Desvignes is another of the region’s most respected producers, and it was a pleasure to return following my maiden visit last year. After a quick photo session out in the courtyard with co-proprietors Louis-Benoît and Claude-Emmanuelle Desvignes, we tasted their latest releases from the 2023 vintage in the barrel cellar. “Flowering was magnificent, so we had a lot of bunches. We also had 80mm of rain in June, which was perfect. The beginning of spring was dry, which is different from a lot of vineyards in France. We had hail twice on July 9 in the north of the appellation and two days later in the south. The first was big stones without wind, and the second was small stones with wind. We had very warm temperatures at the end of August, which made us anxious. The wines are a very good surprise in terms of balance. We started the harvest a bit later, around September 8, when it was August 24 the year before. We've changed some practices—doing tressage instead of hedging. The wines are closer to the Burgundy flavor profile than we expected. All the wines are still in concrete tanks or eggs. These larger vessels allow us to work with more CO2,” shared Louis-Benoît Desvignes. The domaine will release their 2023s later this year. They are well worth seeking out. These beautifully crafted expressions of Gamay from vines up to a century old exhibit assiduous use of concrete eggs and demi-muids. In particular, their top cuvée, the 2023 Morgon Les Impénitents, is a splendid follow-up to their 2022, but I was pretty blown away by their stunning 2023 Morgon Côte du Py, a candidate for wine of the vintage.