What Comes After Carbo?
I come from the Beaujolais school of natural wine. The curriculum needs an update. Plus: Lapierre's new poster. Visits to Eloi Gros & Les Vignes de Paulette. And a review of Néauport's interviews.
Here we are on the eve of the Beaujolais natural wine salons of early April, which collectively comprise a sort of Glastonbury of Gamay. It’s been a few years since I’ve had the liberty (and the constitution) to attend them all. This year’s preparations were enlivened by a mild aftershock of Sylvie Augereau’s “Additives versus Intruders” controversy, when natural Beaujolais institution Domaine Lapierre accompanied a March 7th Facebook post of the La Beaujoloise poster with the following text (my translation):
Des vins natures des vins bios et surtout des vins droits à la Beaujoloise; on y sera.
Natural wines organic wines and above all straight wines at La Beaujoloise; we’ll be there.
Many objected to the suggestion that wine should be “above all” straight or free of flaws. But a more penetrating criticism came from a friend from the Beaujolais, who pointed out that the overwhelmingly majority of estates presenting at La Beaujoloise are not, or not entirely, organic-certified.
It’s not the Lapierres’ style to deliberately mislead. The kerfuffle is just the latest example of an historic estate neglecting the airtight editorial work necessary to deploy social media without causing kerfuffles.
CARBONIC MACERATION ACCORDING TO LAPIERRE
In lighter Lapierre news, estate co-manager Mathieu Lapierre recently completed the French version (an English version will follow) of a long-gestating project: an educational poster about the practice of carbonic maceration, which he’ll be giving out at La Beaujoloise on Monday April 8th. This is one of those ideas so obvious and useful it is astonishing no one ever did it before. But then again, who would have the authority of Domaine Lapierre on the subject?
The technique of cool carbonic maceration pioneered by the triumvirate of Marcel Lapierre, itinerant winemaker Jacques Néauport, and Beaujolais winemaker and wine scientist Jules Chauvet has had immense influence on the natural wine landscape. Initially adopted by Marcel Lapierre’s early entourage, including Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévénet, Guy Breton, Georges Descombes, Jean-Claude Chanudet, and Yvon Métras, it has been embraced by successive generations of natural winemakers in the Beaujolais and throughout France and abroad.
Despite its generalization in the winemaking world, the actual mechanisms of carbonic maceration remain ill-understood by consumers (and even many winemakers). So Lapierre’s poster, handsomely illustrated by watercolors by the celebrated French cartoonist GAB, stands to greatly improve the wine conversation.
WHAT COMES AFTER CARBO ?
My own first experiences in wine production occurred in the cellars of Marcel Lapierre acolytes Yvon Métras and Guy Breton. You could say I come from the school of Beaujolais natural wine. But lately I’ve come to believe the curriculum - even as it is immortalized on Mathieu Lapierre’s new poster - needs an update.
Not because, as many tasters claim, carbonic maceration effaces terroir, or makes things taste the same. (On that issue, I’m with Le Baratin’s Philippe Pinoteau, who once memorably put it, “It doesn’t flatten expressions of terroir - if people can’t see the differences, it’s just that they don’t know how to taste them.”) It’s because the persistent run of hot, ripe, often dry vintages in the region amounts to a wholesale change in climate, one that calls for certain modifications to Lapierre-style carbonic maceration, a method which, it’s worth remembering, was initially addressed to the much cooler regional climate of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.
In cool vintages like 2021, the Lapierre method comes into its own. Enzymatic degradation in whole clusters lowers malic acidity, while chilling of the harvest allows for a long maceration that extracts aromas more than tannins. You can summon gourmandise from leanness.
In hot vintages, like just about every other vintage in recent memory, Lapierre-style carbonic maceration reveals its limitations. Musts with low malic acidity see it vanish promptly, with an augmented risk of piqure lactique; meanwhile, in low acid circumstances when long macerations are inadvisable, chilling of the harvest often merely prevents a brisk, healthy start to fermentations. At best, you get jellied, confit wines. At worst, you get sweetish vinegar, or something close to it. (Even many Beaujolais vignerons seem implicitly to recognize these dynamics when they suggest that carbonic maceration is ill-suited to winemaking in, say, the Roussillon or the Gard.)
A STYLISTIC RECKONING
I am, as many will point out, not a winemaker, and I don’t have the answer to fill the vacuum where a new model for present-day Beaujolais natural vinification should be.
My bet is the way forward will involve an uncomfortable reckoning with stylistic precedent. In much the same way that those harvesting at maximal ripeness in the Mâconnais and Alsace are lately experiencing volatile acidity levels more suited to historical oxidative winemaking in the Languedoc and the Roussillon, those insisting on maximal ripeness in the Beaujolais might need to look beyond the regional paradigm of lightness and grace, and begin engaging in more pigeage and longer élévage, like certain natural winemakers in the northern Rhône. Those who can’t give up lightness and grace might begin harvesting rather earlier and conducting shorter, warmer whole-cluster macerations, the manner of, say, Matassa’s Tom Lubbe, who knows a thing or two about conjuring grace in hot places.
Everyone making wine recognizes the climate is changing. But relatively few are the vignerons who accept that it has changed, and who change their methods and stylistic aims in accordance with that reality.
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For subscribers, here are more dispatches from the present-day of the Beaujolais:
A new PODCAST with MATHIEU LAPIERRE, on the subject of his HANDSOME NEW EDUCATIONAL POSTER about CARBONIC MACERATION. Listen here. (No paywall.)
A profile of ELOIS GROS, a young BLACE vigneron (and DOMAINE LAPIERRE cellarmaster) making UNSULFITED BEAUJOLAIS-VILLAGES on INSANE HILLS in VAUX and LE PERREON.
A profile of LES VIGNES DE PAULETTE, a partnership comprised of CLARA CAUQUIL and SIMON MIALON, who since 2022 farm on both sides of the BEAUJOLAIS-MACONNAIS border, including vineyards recovered from retiring LEYNES maestro PIERRE BOYAT.
A BOOK REVIEW of JACQUES NEAUPORT, LE DILETTANTE, the 2021 compilation of INTERVIEWS with the NATURAL WINEMAKING LEGEND by artists HELENE BERTIN and CESAR CHEVALIER.
If you happen to be around Lyon later this month, I’ll be signing copies of The World of Natural Wine and offering pours of my own peculiar wines from abandoned vines here:
April 21st: BUFÉ (Lyon, FR) - From 4pm onwards. A book signing and wine tasting with my friend Mathieu Kochen (of Odessa Comptoir and Odessa L’Ecole) in the kitchen.
Many thanks, as always, for reading! And for listening! Here’s to fond memories of crystalline cool-vintage Beaujolais 🍷
FURTHER READING & LISTENING
NDP Podcast Ep. 18: Michele Smith-Chapel of Domaine Chapel
Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part I
Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part II
Informative and cogent notes, thank you, Aaron.
Great article Aaron, can we find the French version of Lapierre’s poster somewhere on-line? Perhaps on Instagram?