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A Dozen Reasons to Drink Beaujolais

Nothing is trendy about Beaujolais. Yet for a lot of younger wine drinkers reared on a diet of either mass-market bottles or orange wines and natural wines, discovering it can be a nurturing next step.

Though Beaujolais was in many ways the region that gave birth to natural wine, I don’t hear much about it from younger people who gravitate toward more esoteric bottles.

Earlier generations of wine lovers who turned away from cabernet sauvignon, critics, wine scores and other symbols of convention, embraced Beaujolais, which had its own mid-20th-century narrative journey.

Recently, I shopped in New York stores for good Beaujolais. It’s not at all hard to find. Dozens of great bottles are out there, and I assembled a group of 12 that I highly recommend.

They are largely from the 2020 vintage, and range in price from $16 to $43. I don’t say these 12 bottles are the best, but they are an excellent cross section of what’s good across all Beaujolais appellations.

Beaujolais was the original thirst-quenching wine — light, tart and low in alcohol. It was served by the pitcher (or barrel) in countless inexpensive restaurants across France. This all began to change in the 1970s, when Beaujolais Nouveau, a charming local ritual of making a new wine just after the harvest, became a global phenomenon.

Nouveau’s popularity in effect put all the region’s eggs in one faddish basket. When the craze died down, farmers who had followed the Nouveau formula of harvesting early so that the big producers could create a fruity, candied wine were left with nothing.

The 1990s and early 2000s, when Nouveau sales crashed, were a time of crisis in Beaujolais. It was often cheaper for farmers to leave grapes on vines to rot than it was to harvest them. Unsold wine was distilled into industrial alcohol. But a potential solution also presented itself.

A small group of like-minded vignerons who had rejected the mass-production Nouveau ethos of chemical farming and manipulated wines, came under the influence of Jules Chauvet. This local winemaker and scientist preached organic viticulture, avoiding the use of factory yeast and other manipulations in the cellar, and reducing or eliminating the use of sulfur dioxide, a preservative and antioxidant.

These producers, including Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton, Jean-Paul Thévenet and Georges Descombes, demonstrated a different path for Beaujolais.

They would make essentially natural wines that combined the thirst-quenching joy inherent in gamay, the grape of Beaujolais, with the ability to exhibit the nuances of place and to age and evolve. This was antithetical to the popular notion that Beaujolais must be consumed young.

Unlike the cheap and cheerful Nouveau, these wines emphasized the Beaujolais crus, 10 areas in the north of the region that had been judged to have superior potential for making wines distinctive of their place of origin. In alphabetical order, they are Brouilly, Chénas, Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Fleurie, Juliénas, Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Régnié and St.-Amour.

Many early fans of natural wines fell in love with these crus. Those from these modern pioneers and the producers they influenced have gotten better and better over the last 15 years, as well as more expensive. Cheap Beaujolais can now cost $50 a bottle or more.

But the crus account for only a small part of the region’s production. Two other generally less-expensive appellations, Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages, supply most of the wine, but have often been ignored as the focus has remained on the crus. They, too, have benefited from the revolution in quality.

Of the 12 bottles I recommend, seven are cru Beaujolais and the other five are Beaujolais or Beaujolais-Villages. The difference is evident. The crus are generally more complex. They can benefit from aging. The others are more immediately joyous. I don’t say one is better than the other. They can both be the best choice, depending on the occasion for drinking them.

Here they are, from least to most expensive.