Although the Château du Moulin-à-Vent’s origins date back to the early years of the 18th century, it has arguably reached its apogee under the stewardship of the Parinet family, who purchased the property in 2009. Since then, extensive improvements in the way the vineyards are managed has helped to preserve a treasure trove of old vine material, with some vineyards heading towards their centenary.
The Château owns six different parcels of vines, spread out across some of the best terroirs in the Moulin-à-Vent cru, of which five are planted on the region’s famous pink granite. There are a couple of multi-vineyard blends in the portfolio, but the Château’s true gems are the single-vineyard wines and the micro-cuvées, each of which is based on specific sites within named lieux-dits. The Champ de Cour is the only wine made from grapes grown on a mix of clay and alluvial stones, a terroir which lends the cuvée generosity and richness. Les Verillats and La Rochelle, both from specific lieux-dits, are fine-boned and precise, testament to their stony, free-draining vineyards, and of the two the Verillats is more approachable in its youth, while La Rochelle is somewhat sterner. The zesty, focused Grands Savarins comes from a plot of land situated within Aux Caves, which lies on the borders of Fleurie and shares some of that Cru’s typical nervosity. The wines from the Clos de Londres, a plot located just beneath the eponymous windmill, is an altogether darker, denser affair, but is equally ageworthy.

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.

Jean-Louis Dutraive is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of organic viticulture and natural winemaking in Fleurie. Jean-Louis is now taking a back seat as this three children – Justin, Ophélie and Lucas – take over responsibility for winemaking at the Domaine de la Grand’Cour.
Together they make four different Fleurie cuvées. La Chapelle des Bois is bright and vivid and very approachable from the minute that it’s bottled. The Clos de la Grand’Cour is more structured, its lush fruit restrained by stony tannins that suggest a need for a bit of time in bottle. There’s a dense, concentrated Vieilles Vignes cuvée, too, made from a parcel of wines aged between 50 and 80 years old and grown within the Clos. There’s also another old-vine bottling, this time from the lieu-dit of Champagne, an astonishing wine of great complexity and extraordinary length.
All three Dutraives make wines under their own names too. Justin’s are pale in colour and lighter in style than those from the family property, with the floral, ethereal Beaujolais Villages the surprising star of the line-up. Ophélie focuses her attentions on Moulin-à-Vent, and the Les Thorins is poised and juicy. Lucas has only just begun to develop his own style, so watch this space for the wines from the new kid on the Dutraive block.

Pauline Passot worked in Lyon as a sommelier then travelled to New Zealand to work at the iconic Seresin Estate before returning home to the family domaine in 2016. She launched her own label, Domaine Pauline Passot, with the fruit from a small parcel of vines in Chiroubles’ Grille Midi, then two years later took over her parents’ property, the Domaine de la Grosse Pierre.
She now farms nearly 10 hectares of vineyards, most located on the steep granitic slopes of Chiroubles. Passot adapts her winemaking to the requirements of each vintage, varying the proportion of de-stemmed fruit to whole bunch based on the ripeness of the stems. Her style of extraction is always very gentle, however, resulting in the creation of wines with great purity of fruit and poise, and very little in the way of overt tannin. The Grille Midi, an intensely perfumed wine, is the only one still bottled under her own label. All other cuvées are labelled as Domaine de la Grosse Pierre, including Claudius, a hugely concentrated bottling based on the oldest vines on the family property, and Au Craz, a fine, nervy wine made from grapes planted in a high-altitude vineyard. There are a couple of other cuvées in the line-up; a rounded Fleurie Bel Air and a firmly structured Morgon Douby.

Jean-Claude Lapalu is widely acknowledged as one of the icons of Beaujolais’s natural wine movement. When he took over his family vineyards in the 1990s, he was farming conventionally with the aim of sending his grapes to the local cooperative. He soon began questioning both the values of this style of viticulture, and also the kinds of wines being made with his grapes, so trained himself on a different approach, converting his vineyards to organic viticulture and making his own wines.
His minimalist approach to vinification results in the creation of wines notable for the purity of their fruit, and the precision of their balance. Even though many of his vineyards lie within the boundaries of the Brouilly appellation, the wine he’s best known for may well be his Beaujolais Villages Vieilles Vignes, a tangy, perfumed wine with gently raspy tannins. The corresponding Vieilles Vignes cuvée from Brouilly is denser and richer, with a stony minerality. La Croix des Rameaux, another Brouilly, comes from a warmer parcel and shows riper, darker fruit, while the concentrated, layered Cuvée des Fous is the product of a 120-year-old parcel of vines.

Raphaël Saint-Cyr is a man of strong opinions, although he’s not afraid of changing his mind if he’s presented with sufficient evidence that he needs to do so. His approach to winemaking has undergone a complete 180-degree turnaround since he joined the family business in 2008. While he already knew that he wanted to convert the vineyards to organic production – and set to work doing so from day one – his approach to winemaking was one he’d learned from his father, in which yeasts were cultured and tannins were firmly extracted.

Paul-Henri Thillardon grew up in the southern part of Beaujolais, where his father grew grapes for a local cooperative. Thillardon is now based in Chénas, not all that far from his origins as the crow flies, but a million miles away from his cooperative roots in terms of ethos. Bulk-produced entry-level wines are a distant memory, and Thillardon produces some of the most iconic wines in Chénas as well as some white Vins de France. The 14 or so hectares of vineyards, many of them steeply sloping and ploughed by horse, are farmed organically or biodynamically. The winemaking is just as hands-on as the viticulture here.

Although Thillardon began making his wines in the Burgundian style, with partially de-stemmed bunches and rigorous extraction, back in the early years of the domaine, he’s since changed his approach. Inspired by influential ‘natural’ producers like Jean-Louis Dutraive and Yvon Métras, Thillardon went back to Beaujolais basics. The Thillardons now make wines in as minimalistic a way as possible, chilling the grapes right down before tipping the whole bunches into a tank under a blanket of CO2 for a fermentation that comes as close to full carbonic maceration as possible, with no tannins extracted by means of punch-downs or pump-overs. Like many hands-off winemakers in the region, Thillardon works with indigenous yeasts, and keeps sulphite use to a minimum, with a trace added just prior to bottling to ensure that the wines retain the bright, approachable fruit that he hopes to showcase. This isn’t to say that the wines lack complexity – far from it – but the emphasis for these single-vineyard wines is on gorgeous, juicy red fruits and supple, approachable tannins.

Jean Foillard is one of the most revered names in Beaujolais, and a central figure in the region’s natural wine movement. Alongside Marcel Lapierre, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet, he was part of Kermit Lynch’s so-called “Gang of Four,” whose return to traditional, low-intervention winemaking in the 1980s helped redefine Morgon’s reputation. Foillard took over his father’s domaine in 1980 and soon began converting the vineyards to organic farming, eschewing synthetic chemicals and focusing on meticulous vineyard work to coax the best from Morgon’s famed schist and granite slopes.

His holdings are centred around Morgon’s most celebrated terroir, the Côte du Py, whose crumbly, manganese-rich soils give wines of both power and finesse. The majority of his cuvées are made using whole-bunch fermentation à la Beaujolaise, with long, slow macerations to extract complexity without hard tannins. Sulphur use is minimal, and élevage typically takes place in used Burgundian barrels, allowing the vivid fruit and stony minerality to shine through unadorned.

The flagship wine is the Morgon Côte du Py, a benchmark example of the appellation: silky, pure and layered, capable of ageing for over a decade while still delicious young. The Corcelette bottling, from sandier soils, is more fragrant and approachable in its youth, while the Éponym is a more muscular, structured expression from a specific lieu-dit within the Côte du Py. In warmer vintages, the 3.14 – made only in exceptional years – shows profound depth and an almost Burgundian polish. Foillard also produces a juicy, easy-drinking Beaujolais-Villages and a floral Fleurie that show his hallmark precision and finesse in lighter frames.

Mathieu and Camille Lapierre have become almost as renowned as their father, Gang of Four member Marcel, was back in the day. Taking over at the helm of a domaine with such a prestigious reputation has got to be a tough call, yet Mathieu and Camille have not only managed to do so with apparent ease, they’ve become figureheads for their own cohort of Beaujolais winemakers in much the same way as their father was a pathfinder for the previous generation.
The family holdings are all based in Morgon, and all 14 hectares of vineyards have been farmed organically since the early 1980s, at the insistence of the pioneering Marcel. Neither member of the current generation is as dogmatic about winemaking techniques as one might imagine – the aim is to extract flavour and structure from the whole berries as gently as possible before they’re pressed (typically at around the three-week mark) to continue the fermentation, then the wines are aged for a few months, mostly in old barrels. Sulphite use, as one might expect, is minimal. The main Morgon cuvée comes in two versions, one, marked with a ‘N’, has no sulphur at all, while the bottle marked ‘S’ is lightly sulphited before bottling. The nuances are subtle, but the N is usually brighter-fruited, while the S tends towards a slightly savoury palate, especially over time. The Raisins Gaulois, a Vin de France, is a juicy, quaffable wine made from the fruit of the property’s young vines, while the Cuvée Marcel, only made in exceptional vintages, is a powerful, structured bottling derived from centenarian vines. The Camille, named after both the current Camille and her grandfather, is based on grapes grown on the slopes of Morgon’s iconic Côte du Py.