On 30 August 2017, a group of sommeliers gathered at Freek’s Mill in Brooklyn, New York for a technical tasting of a range of cru Beaujolais. The wines were produced by a collective of twelve producers known as the Club Export Cru Beaujolais.
The sommelier panel was comprised of the following tasters:
- Alex Alan, Owner and Wine Director, Freek’s Mill (NYC);
- Arthur Hon, Wine Director, Sepia and Proxi (Chicago)
- Caleb Ganzer, Owner and Wine Director, La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels (NYC); and
- Taylor Parsons, Owner, Whole Cluster Beverage & Hospitality Consulting (Los Angeles).
Principally, the sommeliers were tasked with providing analytical, qualitative evaluations of the
producers’ wines. Secondarily, and more broadly, they were asked to offer insights into how best to
position the wines—and cru Beaujolais in general—to the US market.
The panel was impressed by the overall quality of the wines, and saw clear opportunities for bringing them to various market segments. Not all were created equal: some were ideally-suited to boutique restaurant programs and small retailers, perhaps, while others seemed more appropriate (in both style and in production scale) for larger outlets.
On the whole, the tasting provided an excellent window into the range of styles offered by the next wave of cru Beaujolais imports, and catalyzed a productive discussion on how best to present the region as a whole to both US consumers as well as the sommeliers and other wine professionals who serve them.
INTRODUCTION
On 30 August 2017, a group of sommeliers gathered at Freek’s Mill in Brooklyn, New York for a technical tasting of a range of cru Beaujolais. The wines were produced by a collective of twelve producers known as the Club Export Cru Beaujolais.
The sommelier panel was comprised of the following tasters:
- Alex Alan, Owner and Wine Director, Freek’s Mill (NYC);
- Arthur Hon, Wine Director, Sepia and Proxi (Chicago)
- Caleb Ganzer, Owner and Wine Director, La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels (NYC); and
- Taylor Parsons, Owner, Whole Cluster Beverage & Hospitality Consulting (Los Angeles).
Principally, the sommeliers were tasked with providing analytical, qualitative evaluations of the
producers’ wines. Secondarily, and more broadly, they were asked to offer insights into how best to
position the wines—and cru Beaujolais in general—to the US market.
The panel was impressed by the overall quality of the wines, and saw clear opportunities for bringing them to various market segments. Not all were created equal: some were ideally-suited to boutique restaurant programs and small retailers, perhaps, while others seemed more appropriate (in both style and in production scale) for larger outlets.
On the whole, the tasting provided an excellent window into the range of styles offered by the next wave of cru Beaujolais imports, and catalyzed a productive discussion on how best to present the region as a whole to both US consumers as well as the sommeliers and other wine professionals who serve them.
THE STATE OF PLAY
Cru Beaujolais & The American Consumer
In short, the good news is this: the wine market in the United States is ripe for additional depth in the Beaujolais category—particularly for the high-quality wines that cru Beaujolais can deliver. Several trends have conspired to create this opening, but a few are of particular note.
First and foremost, wine drinkers across the country are diversifying their wine consumption by looking to new regions and appellations, and particularly at imports. This trend has been accompanied by a demonstrable shift, especially among millennials, towards more balanced wines in lieu of those driven by concentration, alcohol and sheer power.
Secondarily, despite widely-documented and market-wide increases in premiumization, the precipitous price increases in the ‘marquee’ regions have fast-outpaced the resources of all but the deepest pockets. Top wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône and other regions both domestic and abroad have been out of reach, practically-speaking, for many years now, and the pace of the increases shows no sign of slowing.
Lastly, many consumers—and again, millennials in particular—have been looking with increasing focus for what might broadly be considered wines of origin: wines with stories, produced in defined
appellations by smaller (or at least non-industrial-scale) producers. This trend is most pronounced in major urban markets, but it is a totally reasonable expectation that it will extend deeper into the marketplace in the coming years.
Taken together, this shifting topography creates a genuine field of possibility for cru Beaujolais, as the category plays synergistically with many of the changes being observed. That said, it remains to be seen whether key markets are primed for consumer-facing efforts to differentiate the various crus from one another. After all, the vast majority of consumers can’t differentiate between different communes of Bordeaux or Burgundy, much less the climats of the latter. It’s likely a stretch to suppose that the tolerance or appetite for such specific information would be significantly different vis-à-vis
Beaujolais…for now, at least.
In the meantime—and in the absence of a deep-dive into the minutiae of terroir variations, exposures and micro-climates—the most effective informational strategy for consumers would be to focus on the stylistic spectrum of the region. More specifically, the technical choices made in the production of cru Beaujolais should be repackaged into easily-groupable styles, so that cru Beaujolais can be presented as a high-quality production area that produces a defined stylistic range stretching from bright, fruity wines (i.e. the fully-carbonic styles) to more structured, traditionally-vinified wines that are more texturally- akin to Burgundy.
Cru Beaujolais & The American Sommelier
While it remains an open question if key markets are prepared for a consumer-facing differentiation of crus within the larger Beaujolais zone, it is undeniable that cru Beaujolais is ascendant on the
professional side of the US wine industry. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that representation of some element of cru Beaujolais is at this point a key component of top-tier wine programs throughout the country. It isn’t hard to see why: the wines are delicious, generally easy to drink, linkable to detailed origin stories, and are available in a market context in which many of the (other) great wines of France are both scarce and exorbitantly-priced.
For sommeliers and buyers in those key markets, and perhaps even especially for those in emerging ones, there is no such thing as too much technical data. And that data should extend well beyond profiles of the crus.
Firstly, it is our opinion that trade-facing education on cru Beaujolais needs to begin with (and be based on) the options available to winemakers in the area at large, as it is a region with a particularly broad spectrum of winemaking approaches. Understanding the range of possibilities—as well as the available technology, the local traditions and the prevailing styles—can provide crucial context for evaluating the wines themselves, which can only help put the right bottles in the right hands.
Once this more robust and collectively-understood foundation is built, a real, deep conversation of the crus will have maximum impact, and providing a deep understanding of what makes each cru unique from the rest can only serve to create possibilities for the category as a whole.
Here again, the details matter. Differentiating the crus on every possible level—elevations, soil types, exposures, harvest dates, clonal variations, vine ages, etc.—and providing the clearest, most detailed information possible reduces the chance that buyers will conflate individual crus and paint the entire
area with a broad brush; creating distinction allows for fleshing-out Beaujolais selections with a range of crus, producers and vintages. In other words, drawing clear lines between the crus allows Beaujolais to further entrench itself as a broad, rich category, and one of which a little depth is necessary for even the most mildly-canonical of French wine programs.
Yet even in the most developed import markets (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), where basic knowledge of winemaking techniques might be relatively sophisticated, a common-denominator understanding of the respective typicity of each cru is still out of reach. Correspondingly (and again, assuming the market is primed to receive this kind of information), differentiating the crus in a detailed, systematic and digestible fashion could have a real impact. To that end, we would propose the breakdown found in the following section. It’s far from complete, but we believe it provides a good foundation from which to work towards a more common understanding.
Moulin-À-Vent
South-southeast of Chénas, on the 200-meter slopes above the town of Romanèche-Thorin, lie the vineyards of Moulin-à-Vent and the first of the famous appellations that arguably make up the heart of the cru zone. Like Juliénas, Moulin-à-Vent has only enjoyed official AOP status since the mid-1930s, but its wines were well-known even in antiquity. Today, it is a relatively large cru, spready over 600ha and counting nearly three hundred growers. It is undoubtedly the darkest, most masculine, tannic and age- worthy of all the crus, giving rise to its occasional moniker, ‘the King of Beaujolais’.
Partly, this is due to the prevailing style of the region, which favors a more Burgundian-style vinification with longer, traditional macerations. Yet also equally impactful are the region’s soils, which are composed primarily of pink granite bedrock—similar to what is found in Fleurie, Régnié and Chiroubles. In Moulin-à-Vent, however, these soils are suffused with quartz veining consisting of high levels of manganese and other rare metals; there is some as-yet-unproven speculation that this aspect of the terroir here contributes to the sturdy character of the wines.
The bands of manganese are also sometimes speculated to contribute to the expressive aromatic profile of the cru, which veers most often to clean flavors of dark plum and purple flowers such as violets. As the wines age, a dark, spicy, earthy character emerges behind the fruit and flowers, and over time the wines begin to take on a distinctly Pinot Noir-ish character. Indeed, this effect is so widespread and clear that the locals even have a verb for this subtle conversion: pinoter.
Moulin-à-Vent wines were especially good, particularly the downright lovely 2013. Solid winemaking here, clearly, but again, it would have been nice to taste a true vertical.
Wines Tasted from Moulin-à-Vent
Domaine Fond Moiroux, Moulin-à-Vent
2015
Domaine Fond Moiroux, Moulin-à-Vent
2013
Moulin-à-Vent 2015
Tasters immediately noted the ‘intensity’ and ‘power’ present here, though most generally
preferred the ‘macerated red fruits’ and other ‘masculine’ aromatics to the ‘brooding’ and ‘top- heavy’ palate. For some, this was simply a sign of youth: ‘potentially a very good wine lurking here’. Two of four tasters said they would purchase.
Moulin-à-Vent 2013
A universally-beloved wine. Tasters praised this as a ‘very good example’ of the appellation, with ‘oak-tinged’ red and purple fruits. The panel found it ‘balanced’, ‘complex’ and ‘serious’, with one noting that it was one of the strongest wines of the day. All tasters indicated an interest to purchase.
The Future is Bright
We are confident that the future is bright for cru Beaujolais. Response to the region’s wines is overwhelmingly positive in the US, among both professionals and consumers, and its popularity is only increasing. Indeed, it is no longer unusual to find surprisingly deep (and broad) listings of cru wines on restaurant wine lists and in retailers in major markets.
Now is the time to widen the scope of cru Beaujolais on offer in the US, and to design a marketing push to accompany it, but this effort must be done intelligently, with corresponding work done on the education front. Beyond increased sales and more skus, the ultimate goal in our opinion would be to see cru Beaujolais listed much like Burgundy or, as we are beginning to see of late, Champagne: multiple selections presented by commune and then, where possible, by climat.
All of this is certainly possible in the near-term, but only if buyers are equipped with the knowledge necessary to see the cru Beaujolais zone for the nuanced, incredibly diverse wine region that it is. The steps outlined here are, we believe, the way to do it.
