Wine region · France
Beaujolais
Granite hills south of Burgundy where Gamay makes light, juicy reds — and, in the ten Crus, considerably more serious ones.
About Beaujolais
Beaujolais is technically part of Burgundy but functions as its own region, with a different grape, different soils and a different reputation.
Carbonic and semi-carbonic maceration — fermenting whole uncrushed bunches under carbon dioxide — is widely used and produces the banana, bubblegum and kirsch notes associated with the style, along with very soft tannins.
The ten Crus (Morgon, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Brouilly and the rest) are a different proposition: structured, ageworthy wines that have little to do with Beaujolais Nouveau, and which the market spent decades underestimating because of it.
Beaujolais Nouveau, released on the third Thursday of November each year, is a marketing invention of the twentieth century and did substantial long-term damage to the region’s reputation for serious wine.
No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A country’s major wine division, usually containing appellations or sub-regions beneath it. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.
Grapes
Wines from here
Soil and geology
Granite and schist in the north, where the Crus sit; heavier clay and limestone in the south.
WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.
Places within it
- Beaujolais-Villages — The middle tier of Beaujolais, covering thirty-eight villages in the granite hills of the north.
- Brouilly — The largest of the Beaujolais crus, wrapped around a hill that carries a separate and more concentrated appellation of its own.
- Chénas — The smallest of the ten crus, adjoining Moulin-à-Vent and making a slightly softer version of it.
- Chiroubles — The highest and coolest of the crus, making the lightest and most delicate Gamay in Beaujolais.
- Côte de Brouilly — The slopes of Mont Brouilly itself, on blue volcanic rock, making a firmer wine than the appellation surrounding it.
- Fleurie — The most perfumed of the Beaujolais crus, and the one whose name has done most for its sales.
- Juliénas — A northern cru on mixed granite and schist, making sturdy, spicy wines with a firm edge.
- Morgon — The sturdiest of the Beaujolais crus, on decomposed schist, and the one that ages most convincingly into something resembling Burgundy.
- Moulin-à-Vent — The most powerful and longest-lived Beaujolais cru, named after a windmill and grown on manganese-rich granite.
- Régnié — The most recent Beaujolais cru, promoted in 1988, on sandy granite between Morgon and Brouilly.
- Saint-Amour — The northernmost cru, on the Mâconnais border, and the one whose sales are concentrated around 14 February.
What to eat, and how to serve it
Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.
Cru Beaujolais
Serve at 14–16°C (cellar cool).
Try with turkey, sausage and mash or vegetarian dishes.
Approximate centroid: 46.13°, 4.62°. WineHQ stores coordinates only where it has them, and does not estimate boundaries it has not sourced.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO) — INAO, France
- eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register — European Commission