BRAMBLES: Almost a Case...

A glee, that could be described as like a kid in a candy store, had overtaken, and almost an hour had eclipsed.  Joyfully filling empty rack spaces and re-arranging sections in a modest, pine-racked wine cellar had produced a few additional rewards, as well.  There was discovery: almost a mixed case of wonderful 2012 Rioja's present, as well as the big-fruit 2015 Beaujolais' collecting dust in that dark, cool space.  And, even as our small medley of cherished 2010 Bordeaux remained undisturbed, we found that our broad collection(1 of this, 2 of that) of Italian values had actually expanded, with odd lots picked up here and there.  It was time well spent for any disciple of wine.

Although there are a few exceptions(mostly generous gifts), the collection of bottles in this particular hoard has been put together having an average price of less than $15 per bottle.  In and of itself, a good quality wine of modest price that can actually enhance a meal is worth celebrating.  Adding the patience to naturally develop that wine, allowing it to mature in a living cellar for its surprising debut around a loving table is just that much more fulfilling.  As all wines have the capacity to benefit from aging, these selections from trusted producers and revered locales provide much more of a reward for those of a little cellar restraint.  You also need to have an idea of what you have, and importantly, what you may be missing for variety.

Variety, the spice of life, even in a modest cellar

In the game of value collection, bottle by bottle the wine cellar slowly grows until there is not a simple space left.  But, then, these are not simple wines. We can buy more storage space, or plan a string of meals that our oldest wines can complement to provide the needed capacity.  With any 750ml bottle perfect for sharing, it does not take long to begin to see vacancies in any humble wine cellar.  Market researchers tend to measure we regular wine consumers at a bottle a week or more, but for those who love this type of delicious research a few bottles a week is so much more likely.

A couple of Rieslings, one from an Alsace domaine, the other from Anderson Valley AVA, an award winning Gamay Beaujolais from the remarkable 2015 vintage, a white-Rhone blend from the Central Coast, and a few rose' bottles graced our table over a recent week.  Not one cost more than $20.  Each of these dry selections offered typical varietal characteristics, some even echoed the season and unique place they were from. Each was intended to either complement or contrast the principal flavors and strengths of most of the delicious preparations they would dance within the mouth.

Wine & food pairing, an insightful art

Repeat. Then, every once in awhile at even the most modest of tables, a wine from the cellar explodes.  It exceeds any expectations; it offers a unique, compelling experience that our routine and evolved standards fall behind. Those occasional wines produce a liquid reward that makes the game of collection quality value wines richly validated, and affirms the joy such a delicious hobby offers. From another typical week, a Malbec from the southwest of France, a 2015 Cahors AOC, over-delivered on its promise of spice and dark fruits.  But it was its texture, its weight, balance and tremendous length in the mouth that made it such a contemplative pleasure to drink.  Days later, an award-winning 2010 Rioja DOC Crianza(minimum one(1) year oak cask, two(2) years aging) made a simple al fresco meal a culinary event to savor.

For neophyte wine collectors, referencing vintage charts and reading labels from known producers can help, but a trusted importers' label may be more valuable.  Those ubiquitous shelf talkers, if accurate, can encourage, but most are just typical marketing fluff.  Most wines available from volume retailers are just that, produced by the vast industrial wine complex, and not much beyond vin ordinaire.  Search out small shops and smaller regional producers that along with heritage, have lower costs of production to supply your value wine cellar. More valuable may be the insight offered by the independent wine merchant and a relationship that is built over time.  And, as always, the information we gather independently to nurture our wine hobby, weather by tasting or reading is a valued base for any collector.  Shopping local wine sales and on-line flash sites will only add to the liquid adventure. Ultimately, for the price of a single movie ticket, a surprising and delicious bottle of value vino can be acquired, matured and pleasingly shared.  If, by now any remain unconvinced of the hedonistic pleasures offered by such a frugal wine hobby, at the very least it is almost a case.

Wine from the cellar, a special treat regardless of price!

Salute!

WineLinks:
 https://www.winemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Vintage_Chart_2017.pdf
 https://winesfromspainusa.com/vintage-chart/
 https://www.robertparker.com/resources/vintage-chart

BRAMBLES: Home Wine $ellar

Go to the small basement cellar(it is really just racks of stored bottles); find an appropriate bottle of wine(requires inspecting several labels); open found bottle of wine with anticipation, and share with prepared plate; and(hopefully) feel moments of contentment. Especially because wine is at our family table almost every day, it is an earned joy to pull from our home stored bottle inventory for just about every occasion. Included are a small selection of high acid whites and reds, brooding vin rouge of depth and tannic structure, and even a few bottles of viscous nectar's that pair with rich appetizers or desserts. Typically, when visiting a local retail bottle shop or virtual store I will collect several bottles of the same quality wine. Over time a small collection grows across a spectrum of types of wine that are allowed thru bottle aging to develop a more mature character, escaping the thinness and pitfalls of youth. Admittedly, as I have no fondness for most young red wines(Beaujolais & Dolchetto being an exception), and also find a real satisfaction in being able to provide wine for almost every meal without leaving the home.  Gradually, over the years I have afford-ably built a conservative, but diverse home wine $ellar.

What has developed down below is an ever changing global selection of quality to value(sub $20.) wines, perfect for everyday enjoyment that I admit are the joyful result of wishful procurement. Additionally, among the sleeping bottles are a few of advanced age, with many, if not most of the great wines that I have been privileged to enjoy over the years having been offered to me by good friends.  These have been special wines that have changed the way I look at wine as a living thing; the perceptive wine aromas and especially their taste present an ambrosia of the gods beyond what is outside commonly standardized vino perceptions. They have changed the personal lexicon of wine description due to an unfamiliar reminder in what a mature wine can become. These are wines of evolution, bacchanals of breeding and nurturing which many times are like nothing else that routinely graces our table.

Winter pruning in the Loire

Our use of a wine quality assessment, I believe, is based on collected quality experience. To appreciate any wine it is important to know what you are drinking. It is not just the perceived distinction in the profiles of, say, Sauvignon Blanc compared to Verdejo.  Both are influenced by zippy acids and a bright citrus personality, both a complement to light dishes of a little acidity. It is also important to have had the taste 'experience' that would enable an identification of a particular flavor, aroma or perceived secondary trait as a clue to unique character in the glass. It was not until 2007 that I had tasted fresh red currants, thereby offering a memory of the taste distinction from cranberries or tart cherries.  Many grape varieties, too, are chameleon in personality, a reflection of the environs where they were natured and nurtured. Within a comparative single varietal, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is different when tasted against a Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc in large part because they reflect differences in where they are grown.  Any cellar would benefit from both food friendly selections.

As we begin to collect bottles for our cellars, our goal needs to be wines that display harmony and balance in the glass, and I have found that aged wines can offer these qualities more seamlessly. Typically, the recognizable personality traits are there, as you may perceive a reflection of honeysuckle in that golden glass of mature Chardonnay or a hint of plum pudding in an opaque red Merlot, bonded to its structure. Well aged wines of quality will offer those notes in a stream of many other flavor impressions, all offering for your attention.  The characteristic bitterness or astringency of youthful wines will have faded, blending into a more harmonious chord of a mature and developed wine. Sublime and inspiring, a properly aged wine rewards the patient taster, and can challenge to reassess our general perceptions of what wine is, even our everyday wines like those waiting on our expanding racks.

Many of these regional and varietal portraits have been offered in earlier posts here, such as a viewing of Gamay(11/25/14) where you may find a use for the 'red currant' descriptor. A quaffable bottle at a time, acquiring a broad selection of wines in a personal cellar that is dark and cool offers the easy opportunity to have on hand an accessable stored bottle of Chardonnay when it can really dance with a meal like a pasta carbonara, or a planned pairing of the food-friendly Piemonte Barbera with an impromptu antipasti plate. Favorite bottles will wait patiently to be shared with good friends who stop by, whatever their personal flavor preferences for wine may be. Rather than leaving a good time with dear friends, a personal wine collection allows the collector to spend more time enjoying fellowship, and the pride of just walking downstairs to produce a wine that may be savored and talked about in the future.  As collected for future occasions, wine as a living, breathing liquid mystery capable of maturation, is best enjoyed with food, and becomes even greater because your home $ellar is always better when shared. And, that makes it a collection of values, too!

Cheers to a Happy New Year!

Tasting Values:
NISIA Verdejo, 2013 Rueda Old Vines, fresh summer fruits lift from the glass;  zippy, citrus and green melon with a kiss of mineral that dances and lingers.

GAMAY: Beaujolais' Triumphant Harvest

Autumn vineyards of Beaujolais

Yellow to brown hues decorate our neighborhoods as seasonal trees loose leaves and carpet the streets.  In the nearby vineyards, grapevines too display a change in color as they loose the green pigment, chlorophyll, producing a temporary tapestry of autumn shades. Here, grapes fill the wine cellars as this annual right of passage displays such outdoor beauty, only to drive its winemakers indoors. Weeks before the arrival of Fall, far away vineyard managers were triumphantly calling for an early harvest in the Beaujolais vineyards of eastern France.

Growing in popularity, early ripening Gamay(Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc) was ready for its collection. It had been a challenging growing season, but that was nothing when compared to its 'criminal' past. An offshoot of noble Pinot Noir, Gamay has found a home south of Burgundy, in an area barely 55km long, outside of the Rhone department. Ostracized from its native homeland, it had adapted quickly in the granite based soils north of Lyon. Historically, the Romans had planted on these hillside communes of Brouilly and Morgon along the established trading route. This region had less importance, but shared its agri-development during the Dark Ages sitting between nearby Burgundy and the Rhone.

Being less challenging to cultivate and earlier in ripening than its fickle parent, Pinot Noir, widely planted Gamay had run afoul of the law. It was the curse of the Philippes',  when in 1695 Philippe the Bold, then Duke of Burgundy, outlawed Gamay in the increasingly prestigious Burgundy zone, pushing plantings further to the south. More than two generations later, Philippe the Good issued yet another edict against lowly Gamay, sealing its fate to the lesser department of the southern hilly region demarcated today. There it languished, only to became known outside of the region once rail connected them to Paris near the end of the 19th century.

With the Massif Central to moderate its semi-Mediterranean climate, this 34-mile strip, larger than any one region in Burgundy, produces today more than 13 million cases of wine from the valleys and foothills west of the north-south River Sao'ne. Gamay is the bastard cross, a progeny of Pinot Noir and white Gouais, an ancient variety that long ago traveled from Central Europe. Gouais most famous offspring is Chardonnay, which was infamously cherished by the then nobles of Burgundy.  Here, the broad appellation is simply, "Beaujolais AOC", where almost everything qualifies, producing simple wines for the bistros of Paris. Advancing in quality, there are more than three dozen villages, mostly to the south of the region, that qualify for the Beaujolais-Villages AOC. If the grape reflects its site, here tended along a flatter terrain it is clay that becomes more prominent in the soils, producing simpler wines.

2014 Harvest under threatening Beaujolais skies

In the North of the region, 10 distinctive schist-granitic soiled hillside villages produce the pinnicle of Beaujolais, designated as 'cru'. Grapes from these sloping hillsides offer the best expression of Gamay, producing more full bodied wines from lower yield vineyards. From the deeper colored, long-lived AOC's of Moulin-à-Vent, Morgon and Juliénas, to the fruity, well-balanced wines of Côte de Brouilly, Chiroubles, Chénas, Saint-Amour and Fleurie, this is Gamay country. It is the 'cru' Beaujolais that can produce exceptional wines; wines that are bright, mouth-filling, palate lingering and cellar-worthy for comparatively very reasonable prices.


For this 'criminal' grape, outlawed to the hills, a grape of thin skin and a low density of tannins, this past growing season was unseasonably cool, and rainy throughout the summer. Further north,  Burgundy was hit by severe summer hailstorms, producing the smallest crop in many years.  Coupled with increasing demand from Asia for its already scarce Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, consumers should expected price increases of up to 15% for the wines of Burgundy, according to many estimates. Further south, the cool, wet summer in Beaujolais was salvaged by warm, sunny ripening conditions in early September, bringing again a triumphant early harvest. As a result, the pricing quality to value represented by quality Beaujolais will continue to be available to discerning consumers.

To keep its cherry-bright, low-tannin personality, most Beaujolais today is the result of a controlled fermentation called, carbonic maceration; a whole cluster evolution in a carbon dioxide rich pressurized environment.  Uniquely, fermentation takes place within each individual berry, producing an aromatic freshness, often associated with the notes that remind us of bubble gum. The resulting personality makes these quality wines perfect for the social gathering of the many flavors on a Thanksgiving table. Recent Beaujolais Village vintages have offered consistent quality as they ride on the marketing coattails of immature Beaujolais Nouveau, but it is in the delicious cru where this Gamay criminal annually triumphs.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!
Salute!

WINE STUDY: Grape Characteristics (3)

Appearance, aromatics and flavor characteristics of any wine are assessed by each candidate of the upcoming Wine Educators Certification exam. By virtue of this process, tasters will be challenged to identify the dominant grape varietal of the wine, and in a separate exam, any of its potentially numerous faults that cause a wine to be out of balance.  As our exploration of global grape varieties continues, we arrive at a place where the grape names are not as familiar, but remain a principally important commodity not only to their individual international localities, but also to any aspiring wine educator. Fortunately for domestic consumers, these varieties can represent some of the greatest quality to price values on the broad, sometimes obscure, wine planet. Let's raise our glasses to some of the role players.

Pinot Blanc(Pinot Bianco, Weissburgunder) offers fruity aromas of apple, citrus and flowers while being typically medium to full bodied.  It's character is not unlike Chardonnay, which is understandable as they are both have history in Burgundy and may be genetic mutations of the same variety: Pinot Noir. Full bodied examples can be found most notably in Alsace and northern Italy, whereas in Germany or Austria the grape is shown as a medium bodied varietal where it can be found in stylings that are either dry or slightly sweet.
Semillon, easily cultivated and of prolific yields,  is a white grape distinguished by being modestly low in acid for such an early ripening variety.  Although easily sunburned, this thin skinned grape of almost oily texture is typically susceptible to Bortrytis cineria or noble rot fungus, and thus a principal partner in some of the world's greatest sweet wines. It can't be a Sauternes or a Barsac without Semillion in the blend. When grown as representative, this rich grape variety can show mineral elements, with rich and complex flavor notes of citrus, stone fruits and apples. Today, there are some terrific examples of the unique character of this grape in balance with Australia's Chardonnay.

Noble Rot fungus

Torrantes is an aromatic grape variety that typically is floral-citrus in its aroma, and is the principal white wine grape of long-isolated Argentina. On the palate it tends to be bright and crisp with good acid, flavor notes of flowers, stone fruit(like peach, apricot) and citrus. This perfumed variety can offer tropical fruit and distinctive kumquat flavors, and is a good foil for the regions staple chimichurri sauces. Today, most quality Torrantes wines are value priced and becoming more widely available throughout our marketplace 
Trebbiano(Ugni Blanc) is among the most widely planted wine grapes in the world! This high yield grape is generally undistinguished, but offers usually high acid to carry its fresh fruit flavors. Such 'fresh' characteristics allow Trebbiano to be very popular in its native Italy where it is broadly planted, and is principally important in the production of French distilled Cognac, Armagnac and even industrial alcohols. With its tough skins, it is easy to grow, and can offer subtle citrus and apple aromas/flavors, and finds itself typically blended with other white grape varieties.

Serralunga de Alba, Piedmont, Italy

Barbera is widely planted in its native Piedmont region of hilly northern Italy, where it grows vigorously, offering opaque skinned grapes of relatively low acidity. In its youth, it can be intensely aromatic, offering a nose of red and black berries. As it matures losing its freshness, the flavor notes become more of stewed or pruned vine fruits with the oak spice of its barreling becoming increasingly prominent.As the most widely planted and consumed grape of its native region, it is a terrific food wine for regional cuisine.
Gamay, an old cultivar in its native eastern France, is a purplish low tannin grape with naturally high acidity and typically high yields. Grown in the right soils, it can become very Pinot-like in the best growing years. Outlawed in Burgundy in 1395, it continued to prosper to the south in Beaujolais, as well as in the Loire Valley prior to becoming a world traveler. As an early ripen-er, the best of it today produces lighter, fruity wines with bright aromas of sour cherries, strawberry and even banana. On the palate, flavors of raspberry, dried berry and orange peel can be balanced with a hint of chalk, and rarely a dominant trace of oak.

Post-veraison Nebbiolo

Nebbiolo, may take its name for the Piedmont term for fog, 'nebbia'. In its youth, this high extract dark variety can produce light wines that are heavily tannic.  In fact this aromatic and structured native, with its aromas of tar, truffles and violets, is among the most tannic of all grape varieties.  It necessitates years of aging to expose its charms; offering herbal and woodsy notes of high acid red raspberry, ripe prunes and bitter chocolate. Generally producing wines of higher alcohol, this is one of the few of the world's noble varieties that has not successfully gone international.
Tempranillo (Cencibel, Tinta Roriz) has the distinction of being the Spanish 'noble' grape, getting its name from 'temprano', as in early to ripen. Here too, is another important grape that has not traveled auspiciously with any of the achievements it earns in its native vineyards. Across northern Spain it produces early ripening, thick skinned dark clusters that offer a woodsy and dusty character.  It can be 'fruit challenged' in the bottle, offering lean aromas of cherries, strawberries, leather, and road dust. Typically bush trained, it is a moderately tannic high pigment grape variety that also happens to be low in acid. As a result, its best examples tend to be blended with brighter varieties, producing more faint berry notes as well as increasingly earthy with advancing age.

Any of these or other grape varieties will stand ceremoniously in front of the aspiring wine educator on a placemat field of white paper. The best of these applicants will successfully identify principal grape varieties and major production regions using deductive reasoning from all the wine grape knowledge they have accumulated. They will ask themselves why that wine sample is not a Barolo from the Nebbiolo grape, but rather a Syrah. Or perhaps they will deduce that the white wine sample is a Sauvignon Blanc and not a Torrantes from the Salta region. In a separate testing, altered faults and imbalances of the same wine must be identified from the eight(8) similar wines that are displayed in front of them. An ability to recognize concentrated traits of sulfur dioxide or excessive tannin will serve the aspiring wine educator well in this portion of the faults exam. Only one sample in this field, however, will match the control sample, but which one?  For the successful student such questions will have the foundations of their answers in dedicated wine study. It probably doesn't hurt to also know as many grape variety characteristics as possible.

"Best while you have it to use your breath,
  for there is no drinking after death"
Cheers!

BRAMBLES: Harvesting Wine Questions

Muscadet from the Nantes of the Pays de la Loire region in Brittany or a cool vintage mid-Loire Vouvray could have been the recent Wine Educator's Certification Exam dry white wine control sample. Red choices included a recent vintage Carneros Pinot Noir and a large producers Beaujolais Village, that may have been the result of carbonic maceration.  The challenge was to determine which was which in a field of other similar varietals. Weeks after the benchmark exam, these and many other questions persist for this aspiring Wine Educator.

Loire Chenin Blanc

Muscadet, also known as Melon de Bourgogne,  is the volume leading grape of France's Loire river valley region. Vouvray is a wine region east of Tours, producing mostly wines from the high acid Chenin Blanc grape in styles that can be in a range of dry to sparkling. This was going to be a tough identification, because both were austere and green fruit influenced. Isolated from the other red wine samples, I knew Napa Valley's Carneros appellation as a cool climate region, known for some of the North Coasts best Chardonnays and Pinot Noir's. But recent harvests have been cool, resulting in high-acid wines that may not exhibit the ripe richness of any typically characteristic fruit. In effect, they can be more Gamay or 'Beaujolais-like'. To complicate matters, the Gamay vineyards of the most-southern Burgundy region, enjoyed a warm and rich harvest in 2009, producing more wines that were actually resembling Burgundy AOC Pinot Noirs. As with other wine exams, choices had to be made based on accumulated knowledge and perception. That is not unlike the annual choices premium grape farmers make every harvest season, especially this mild year.

Cote du Beaune Pinot Noir Harvest

In the weeks of this year's cool and wet Spring, local vine flowering and berry set were challenged. Fewer flowers, many knocked off by seasonal rains, poor pollination and the resulting shatter of a weak berry set indicated early on that the years harvest would be drastically affected. Trying to farm my few Sonoma County vines sustainably, an outbreak of a fungal powdery mildew, encouraged by cool temperatures, veiled Springs newly grown canopy, just as my vine curtain's fruit was forming. Outside of the seasonal rains, I purposely stopped supplemental irrigation, the canopy was then de-leafed to improve air circulation/exposure and an application of a sulfur mixture was applied to abate the fungus outbreak. Then I crossed my fingers.

Bortrytis Noble Rot or Grey Mold

The first of week of October brought un-welcomed rains to Sonoma County's grape crop. Local growers were finding their Chardonnay crop still under-ripe, with levels of sugar stuck well below the optimum for an anticipated harvest.  It was now a waiting game.  Some fruit was already showing signs of the bortrytis fungus, or noble rot, where the moldy skins break down and remaining sugars concentrate.  This would be great for Semillion, but a blight for the counties heavy volume Chardonnay crop. In recent dry days, the winds blew thru to dry the thin-skinned fruit clusters and the mild sun warmed the air.  But would it be enough to hold back the fungal spores that were waiting for the chance to thrive in our Chardonnay vineyards?

Magic in the cellars of Bordeaux

A few weeks of dry weather and sunny skies have given us recent optimism here in wine country.  With more than half of our counties premium wine grape crop of 65,000 acres harvested, mostly thick-skinned, late season ripening varieties like Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon remain to mature. Due to fewer warm days this season and the early rains, the optimistic Napa Register recently reported that this years less-ripe, lower alcohol wines could be the makings of a spectacular vintage. Other grape farmers chimed in following an article in The Drinks Business, which claimed this year's rains "ruined" the harvest. As expected, the responding growers thought the idea too simplistic and too generalized, in part because they profess the ability to develop wonderful lower alcohol wines from grapes of optimum flavor and acidity.

In point of fact, great wines are made in every vintage, and great winemakers will consistently get the most out of the quality fruit they receive. Our global evolution in viticultural science, vineyard management practices and enology simply means that winemakers today have better tools and understanding to produce quality wines.  The proof will be in the bottles of the 2011 vintage.  But not in my ornamental grape garden.  The ripening grapes that were not attacked by Grey Mold have now been eaten by migrating starlings. Overall, I think it will be a much lighter grape harvest this season.

BEAUJOLAIS: A Part & Apart

At the southern edge of Burgundy, situated between Macon and Lyon, the red Gamay grape grows like no where else in the world. This landscape produces more than half of the wine in this wine Mecca known as the region of Burgundy. Yet, some proud Burgundian's don't consider Beaujolais part of Burgundy at all, even as they share the landscape south of Macon(Pouilly-Fuisse). These neighbors are even historically and physically connected by a navigable waterway, the southerly flowing River Saone. Beaujolais is technically part of the Rhone Department to the south, but administered by Burgundy to the north.  It is distinctly Beaujolais, a part of more prominent regions, but remaining distinctly apart.

Morgon Vineyard

Wine grapes came here by way of the Romans, who planted vineyards on the trade route slopes of the Saone Valley in the first century.  In the Middle Ages, the Benedictines brought order and developed a broad vineyard system throughout Beaujolais. The regions fate was defined later when Duke of Burgundy, Phillipe the Bold, issued edicts in the late 14th century banning the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy's heartland, thus fatefully pushing it southward to the granite based sub-soils where it thrives today.

As in many other wine regions, Beaujolais best vineyards lie in the well-drained terroir of its northern shale and granite hillsides.  But unlike other regions, the fortunes of Beaujolais are based on only one thin-skinned, high-density planted grape, Gamay. Hand harvested, most of this regions Gamay wine is produced by semi-Carbonic Maceration, and sold as fresh, lively Beaujolais Nouveau from the third Thursday each November.  Grown mostly in the clay-based soils of the southern region, it produces lighter, tannic-less wines of fruity character,  often described as "bubble-gum" or "pear-drops". This noveau wine has had considerable global marketing success, producing about a third to a half of all Beaujolais wine, yet is also known as 'Vin de Merde' by some prominent French wine critics. But the best of Beaujolais, its Crus or growths, continue to be produced in the more traditional fermentation.

Vin Nouveau et Japan

Its Grand Cru wines from Cote de Brouilly or Moulin-a-Vent can age for a decade or more in a good vintage, but it is the exception for Beaujolais. Of its twelve appellations, Beaujolais, Beaujolais-Village and the ten(10) Crus, most of the everyday wines consumed in the bistros of Lyon are produced by the regions many co-ops and negociants. For the most-part, these are food wines offered for informal immediate enjoyment.  But even everyday wines need their champions. Given the title, the king of Beaujolais, negociant Georges Duboeuf,  alone produces about 10% of the regions wine.



Ten of 39 villages are designated Grand Crus, producing about a quarter of all the regions wines. Wines from non-Cru or multiple villages can be labeled Beaujolais-Villages, with the Beaujolais AOC the blended, generic base classification.  But the glory of Beaujolais comes from the vineyards found in inhospitable and rocky outcroppings above these ten(10) notable villages.  North to South the Beaujolais Crus villages are:

• Julienas and St-Amour

• Chenas and Moulin-a-Vent

• Fleurie and Chiroubles

• Morgon and Regnie

• Brouilly and Cote de Brouilly

Based on the marketing success of this region's vin nouveau, it is very possible to discount the more serious wines of Beaujolais.  Similarly, it is almost impossible to even think of proper Burgundy or Northern Rhone producers considering the same promotional scheme to move product to consumers. But this is Beaujolais, where fortunes are based on only one grape variety no one else wanted. Beaujolais, where you are considered as a part of agricultural and political regions that segregate and want no part of you!

In my limited experience, the concept of terrior, or unique environmental qualities, is expressed very clearly in the Grand Crus of Beaujolais.  Each of these ten(10) growths have consistently distinctive character that makes a Brouilly full, fruity and supple or a Fleurie opening with a intensely floral and fresh fruit aromas. A seductively fruity bouquet combines with St. Amour's fragrant flavors, to contrast with a Morgon's sturdy and compact fruit personality.  In its current release, the vintage of 2009 has much to offer wine lovers.  These fine wines have been described as "intense" and "seemless", from what  may be one of the region's most expressive vintages.  Today there may be no better time to get into being 'a part' of something no one else wanted!

Cheers!