Château Thivin

The oldest wine estate on Mont Brouilly, and, at 30 hectares of vineyards, one of the largest, Château Thivin has been producing wine from its vineyards in Brouilly and the Côte de Brouilly under the guidance of the Geoffray family since 1877. These days the family’s holdings have expanded to include vineyards in the Beaujolais Villages zone and further south, in the pierres dorées of southern Beaujolais. Boundaries are also being pushed with grape varieties – one of the Château’s Chardonnays comes from a small parcel of vines planted on a limestone outcrop on Brouilly’s fringes, while experimental vineyards are populated with a range of grapes that include Piedmont’s Barbera and Nebbiolo, as well as Mourvèdre, Tempranillo and Syrah. There’s even a Vin de France, Utopia, made from a blend of disease-resistant hybrid grapes.
Thivin’s most iconic wines, though, are its Côte de Brouillys, of which there are half a dozen, and its solitary Brouilly cuvée. The latter is probably the fruitiest and most straightforward of the Thivin Crus, with the Griottes de Brulhié, a Côte de Brouilly, representing the fruit-forward face of Mont Brouilly. The remaining wines all show the structure and density typical of wines made from grapes grown on Mont Brouilly’s hard diorite slopes. La Chapelle has sinewy tannins and savoury black pepper and tapenade aromas that call to mind a fine-boned Côte Rôtie, while the dense, brooding Cuvée Zacharie is powerful, complex and age-worthy.