Beaujolais Profile: Elisa Guerin, Chénas
Beaujolais Profile: Elisa Guerin, Chénas
Meet the rising star of Moulin-à-Vent.
Since childhood, young Chénas-based vigneronne Elisa Guerin counts the great natural winemakers of the Beaujolais as close family friends. Her stellar 2019s show she’s been paying careful attention the whole time.
Quick facts:
Guerin is converting 1.5ha of her family’s Moulin-à-Vent vines in the “Thorins” lieu-dit to organic agriculture.
2019 was, for all intents and purposes, her first commercial vintage. She produced two cuvées: a Moulin-à-Vent and a Beaujolais-Villages from purchased fruit. Both are unfiltered and additive free, save 10mg/L sulfites at bottling.
Her father, Philippe, maintains 4ha in Moulin-à-Vent, along with 1ha in Chiroubles, with plans to transfer more vineyards to his daughter in the future.
THE SONS-OF AND DAUGHTERS-OF
I first met Moulin-à-Vent’s Elisa Guerin long before she made any wine. It was the night of the release of 2014 Beaujolais Nouveau at Paris wine bar La Quincave, alongside her friends Jules Métras and Kéké Descombes. I crossed paths with Guerin again in Villié-Morgon that spring, shortly after I’d broken my collarbone in a bicycle accident. Guerin was in the car when Jean Foillard’s daughter Laure, in a stroke of random kindness, stopped to offer me a ride while I was walking back through the darkness to a bed-and-breakfast in Lancié. On both those early occasions I had no idea Guerin came from a winemaking family. She was just a kind, funny girl from the Beaujolais, with a basket-baller’s build, who, like many Beaujolais natives, could drink me under the table.
Guerin kept a low profile. Unlike the aforementioned filles and fils de (as the daughters and sons of vignerons are known), she doesn’t have parents who are natural wine stars. Her father, Philippe Guerin, sold much of his production wine to Georges Duboeuf, as I learned when I visited him for a tasting in November 2015.
As I spent more time in the Beaujolais that year, Elisa Guerin’s passion for winemaking became increasingly evident, as did her clear preference for natural wine. I saw her frequently during harvest chez Yvon Métras and Jean-Louis Dutraive, lending a hand or hanging out during apéro hour. She’s also part of la bande des copines, the informal group of winemakers’ daughters who get together each year since 2014 to produce a wine together from abandoned or unused parcels. (Its members also include Laure Foillard, Ophélie Dutraive, Justine Paris, and Laura Lardy, among others.)
So well-suited did Elisa Guerin seem to the role of young vigneronne that I was surprised back in 2017, when she told me she was moving to Paris. She’d landed a job as a commercial agent for Terroirs d’Avenir, the immensely successful fine foods wholesaler. The job would put Guerin in touch with influential chefs and wine buyers from high-end restaurants throughout Paris. I myself dealt with her, during the brief stint when I managed Chez La Vieille in 2017-2018. For all I knew she seemed to enjoy the job, and life in Paris.
So I was surprised again this September when, at the Terroirs d’Avenir location across from my apartment, I finally saw her name - and not her father’s - on a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages.
KEEP BUYING FROM THIS PARCEL
We organize a little tasting together at my apartment in early October. I adore the ferrous mid-palate, the chocolate-dusted, white-cherry fruit, distinctive to the western Beaujolais, of the Beaujolais-Villages. From purchased fruit from a 1ha parcel in mid-conversion to organics in the “Huire” lieu-dit in western Quincié, it saw a ten-day maceration, before aging in steel tank.
I’m downright astonished, though, when I visit her last week and taste the 2020 Beaujolais-Villages from tank. It’s already dry, kicking with energy, displaying the same holographically distinct aromas.
“Whatever you do,” I tell her, “keep buying from this parcel!”
“We always find the same grain,” she agrees. “There’s always that minerality that stays on the palate. It’s a parcel with very decomposed granite, mixed with blue stone.”
Guerin harvests into small cases and vats whole-cluster. She saturates tanks with CO2. She harvested early in the morning, so the fermentation began naturally at 12°.
THE VINEYARD WAS NEVER SUFFERING
It was just about sunset when I arrived at her family’s winery in Chénas that day, so we hurry to visit the “Les Thorins” parcel of Moulin-à-Vent she began converting five years ago. It’s a gently declining, undramatic slope, its sandy granite shaded with quartz and red clay.
“In the 1930s the terroir was very famous,” she explains. “Les Thorins used to be the same price as Gevrey-Chambertin for the negoçiants.”
The younger vines are massal selections from our friend Sylvain Chanudet. The older vines, downfield, are 80-90 years old. For now her father still vinifies half of their parcels in “Les Thorins.” But little by little, as she takes on more production, she’ll be able to produce 100HL of “Les Thorins.” Yields are still handsome at around 40HL/ha, despite the stress of organic conversion.
“The advantage is that my father always maintained his vines well,” she says. “He herbicided below the vines, but he plowed the middle of the row. He replaced all the missing vines. He pruned into a row. The vineyard was never suffering.”
Her neighbors here are the Château des Jacques and the Château du Moulin-à-Vent, both of whom, I believe, are also in the process of converting these parcels to organics.
Her 2019 “Les Thorins,” aged in cement tank, presents a soft depth, an expansive, dried cherry fruit. It’s a gourmand wine, lush and violetty, with just enough acidity to prevent flabbiness. The 2020, tasted from tank, showed a more athletic profile, a tad more concentrated and acid, both to its benefit. She plans to do some aging in barrel this year, and remains open to bottling without sulfite addition in the future.
“I still have a part time job. So now is the time to experiment, rather than when I’ll have bought vineyards from my father,” she says.
Stylistically, Guerin’s wines fall somewhere between those of Jean Foillard and hot-vintage Jean-Louis Dutraive. They have the former’s crowd-pleasing muscle, and what I’d call the latter’s “visible brushstroke,” a kind of nuanced, textural acidity.
LA VIGNERONNE DEBUTANTE
Guerin still works for Terroirs d’Avenir, handling their small wine selection. The rest of the time she’s another vigneronne debutante, trying to make her mark in the peculiarly saturated market of excellent natural Beaujolais. She’s well aware that the pioneering natural vignerons who rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s remain equally prominent today.
“When you visit clients in Paris, you come to present your wine and they tell you they got drunk with someone you know in the Beaujolais,” she says. “It’s a shame. The clients just remember who they got drunk with. But the Beaujolais needs to be known for its different terroirs, and the different styles of its vignerons.”
Domaine Lapierre, Jean Foillard, and the Georges Descombes clan in particular maintain a vice-grip on Paris bistrots of a certain vintage. But Guerin benefits, too, since she’s well-liked by her forebears. Her first Paris clients, after all, were Le Baratin and Le Verre Volé.
“It’s really nice that Cyril [Bordarier of Le Verre Volé] has confidence in me,” Guerin says, recounting how he included an exclusive primeur version of her first 2018 Beaujolais-Villages in the party he threw at Le Verre Volé that year.
She knows from personal experience that not everyone is always so confident in the work of a new natural vigneronne like herself.
“The very first time I tried a natural vinification was in 2016,” she recalls with a laugh. “The drama my father made, it was cinema! He’s open to new things. But he tends to stress out."
Elisa Guerin
Domaine du Moulin d’Eole
69840 CHENAS
04 74 04 46 88