{"id":19879,"date":"2025-11-26T14:30:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T13:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/?p=19879"},"modified":"2025-11-26T16:59:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T15:59:13","slug":"why-beaujolais-is-bouncing-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/why-beaujolais-is-bouncing-back\/","title":{"rendered":"“Why Beaujolais is bouncing back” – The Observer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Restoring the reputation of this underrated red<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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David Williams – <\/span>Wine critic<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Of the trio of famous wine regions that run into each other as you travel down eastern France, Beaujolais, the smallest, has long been the least celebrated. Growers in the region have for years had to endure the condescension of their neighbours, their typically bright, gluggable reds made from the gamay grape supposedly lacking the sophistication of the ethereally silky pinot noirs of Burgundy to the north, while having none of the dark, elemental, sun-filled allure of the syrahs and grenache-led blends of the Rh\u00f4ne Valley to the south.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This tricky reputational situation wasn\u2019t entirely thrust on the region, however. It was hugely exacerbated by the runaway success, and subsequent rapid fall, of what is still the region\u2019s best-known wine: beaujolais nouveau, a candy-fruited, proudly simple, purple style of young red wine that is rushed to market just a couple of months after the harvest, in time for Beaujolais Nouveau Day on the third Thursday of November \u2013 an event that was once the height of BBC news \u201cand finally\u201d excitement in its 1980s heyday as wine importers rushed to bring the first bottles back to the UK.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018Racy, refined red fruits\u2019:\u00a0 Domaine de Vavril Cuv\u00e9e de l\u2019Ecluse, C\u00f4te de Brouilly 2024. Photograph by Kenneth Lam<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As the British wine writer Natasha Hughes explains in her superb new book,\u00a0The Wines of Beaujolais<\/i>, the lure of quick, easy cash offered by making nouveau (which has none of the cost implications of holding on to stock in expensive oak barrels) led to sharp practice, short cuts and an inevitable fall in quality. By the time the Nouveau\u00a0market collapsed in the early 2000s, any claims\u00a0the region had to being a serious wine producer were as dead as the topsoil in its chemically ravaged, overworked soils.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Hughes\u2019s book is no lament, however, since it is largely concerned with the extraordinary 21st-century renaissance of Beaujolais, and the producers responsible for it. While she stresses that Beaujolais is still a work in progress, and emphasises the important role played by the region\u2019s natural winemaking pioneers (names such as Guy Breton, Jean Foillard, Marcel Lapierre and Jean-Paul Th\u00e9venet) who developed their radical, chemical-free approach as an antidote to the nouveau boom from the late 1970s onwards, Hughes fairly bubbles with enthusiasm for the contemporary scene. Curiously, as Hughes points out, this modern scene owes much to the success of its northern neighbour, which led to an influx of ambitious winemakers driven out of Burgundy by soaring land prices and drawn to Beaujolais by its affordable stocks of old vines, and consumers who are looking for wines to replace the Burgundies they can no longer afford.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Today\u2019s Beaujolais hasn\u2019t left nouveau behind entirely\u00a0(bottles from the best producers have even led\u00a0to\u00a0something of a hipsterish revival for the style in the natural wine bars of Paris, London and New York). But the best of the region is altogether more serious, with producers looking to make wines that are true to the distinctive terroir of their local area or\u00a0cru<\/i>, while always retaining the compulsive drinkability that is, for\u00a0me, the Beaujolais hallmark.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For a mini-tour of the region, I might start with the effortlessly pretty, sappy, cherry-scented EH Booth & Co Fleurie 2020 (\u00a312.50, Booths), from the eponymous cru, before moving on to the racy, refined red fruits so deftly captured in Domaine de Vavril Cuv\u00e9e de l\u2019Ecluse, C\u00f4te de Brouilly 2024 (\u00a316.85, Haynes Hanson & Clark) and the more complex, brushed cotton-textured, but still gorgeously fluent summer berries of Jean Foillard Morgon Cuv\u00e9e Classique 2022 (from \u00a329.95, Hennings Wine; Shrine to the Vine), before finishing with Jean-Paul Brun Beaujolais Blanc F\u00fbt de Ch\u00eane 2023 (from \u00a315.99, de Burgh; Wine Society), a glorious, luminous reminder that Beaujolais\u2019s chardonnay whites can be a match for white burgundy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

https:\/\/observer.co.uk\/style\/drink\/article\/why-beaujolais-is-bouncing-back<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19883,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[142,143,170,173,141],"class_list":["post-19879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-us","tag-bohemian-wedding","tag-country-wedding","tag-lieu-de-reception-mariage-en","tag-mariage-domaine-en","tag-wedding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19879"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19902,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19879\/revisions\/19902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vavril.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}