Granite, and the Ten Crus

Beaujolais divides on its geology, and once you know where the line is the region stops being confusing.

The south is clay and limestone: richer ground, deeper soil, and the home of the light early-drinking wine that the region is famous for and largely trapped by. The north is granite and schist, and every one of the ten crus is up there.

Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Régnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas, Juliénas, Saint-Amour.

Why the rock matters is straightforward and worth stating plainly, because it is the same argument the Côte d'Or makes about its own mid-slope.

Gamay's problem is enthusiasm. It is a vigorous variety that will crop generously given the chance, and on rich ground it takes the chance every time, producing volume and dilution. Granite is poor, acidic and free-draining, and it will not feed the vine. The same grape, denied the resources to overproduce, makes something structured and serious.

That is not a mystical claim about mineral flavours travelling from rock to glass. It is a claim about vigour, and it is the most defensible version of any terroir argument anywhere.

Then the labelling, which is the most useful accident in French wine.

A cru Beaujolais does not say Beaujolais on the label. It says Fleurie, or Morgon, or Moulin-à-Vent. The commune stands alone.

The consequence is that a very large number of people have drunk cru Beaujolais without ever knowing they were drinking Beaujolais, and have enjoyed it, and would have hesitated at the word. The region's finest wines are protected from the region's reputation by a naming convention nobody designed for that purpose.

Now the claim that surprises people, so it is worth being specific.

Moulin-à-Vent and Morgon age. Not in the sense that they survive a decade; in the sense that a decade improves them. A good bottle of Morgon from the Côte du Py at ten or twelve years old is closer in shape and seriousness to a village wine from the Côte de Nuits than to anything the word Beaujolais summons up.

The Côte du Py deserves its own paragraph. It is a hill of decomposed blue volcanic rock inside Morgon, and it is the closest thing the region has to a proper argument about one slope: a specific named hillside whose wines are reliably different from the vineyards around it, farmed by growers who can tell you exactly where their rows sit on it.

Which points at the real comparison.

Beaujolais has the same internal architecture as the Côte d'Or. Régionale at the bottom, villages in the middle, named hillsides at the top, and growers who will talk about their parcels for an hour. The structures are the same and the prices are not close.

The difference is not the care taken, and it is not the ceiling of the grape. It is that one region spent six hundred years teaching the world to read its map, and the other spent thirty years teaching the world that its wine arrives on a Thursday in November.