Cru Beaujolais
by Dustin Soiseth
2023 Côte de Brouilly
France | Beaujolais
The soil at the bottom of the Côte de Brouilly, where Alex Foillard owns and farms a couple of acres of vines, is rich in schist and granite. Now, minerality in wine is subjective and imprecise, but I experience it here both as a texture—the flaky, sparkling schist and the coarse-grained granite—and as a slightly briny note on the finish. If you are looking for an exemplar of minerality in red wine, this might just be the bottle for you. Or, if you rolled your eyes at all that wine-nerd lingo and are seeking a delicious Beaujolais with some interesting complexity wrapped in a cozy blanket of ravishing red fruit, then this also is the bottle for you.
2024 Fleurie
France | Beaujolais
Guy Breton likes wines that are easy to drink, so that’s what he makes. What does that mean, exactly? Well, have you ever experienced a day that’s sunny and a bit misty at the same time, like when the sun is out overhead but there’s still a bit of fog at ground level and the air around you is suffused with sunlight so that the world softly glows? Guy Breton’s Fleurie is like that: soft, plush, and with fruit so juicy you’ll need a bib.
2024 Morgon
France | Beaujolais
It can be challenging to find something new to say about a beloved, well-known wine like Mathieu and Camille Lapierre’s Morgon, so to jump-start the process, I put a bunch of reviews and tasting notes for recent vintages into a word cloud generator. The top results: fruit, ripe, cherries, chock-full, plenty, juicy, structured, pleasure, benchmark. You get the idea. It’s an icon, and the new vintage is here.