2025 Marcel Lapierre "Le Beaujolais" Beaujolais Rouge

"Le Beaujolais" comes from 2.5 hectares of 50 to 80 year old Gamay on sandy decomposed granite, in parcels just beyond the Morgon appellation boundary, farmed organically with certification. It is made at Domaine Lapierre in Villie Morgon, the estate Marcel Lapierre took over from his father in 1973 and, from 1981, rebuilt around the teachings of Jules Chauvet, the forerunner of France's natural wine movement, whose rejection of cultured yeasts, filtration and added sulfur shaped everything that followed. With Jean Foillard, Jean Paul Thevenet and Guy Breton, Marcel formed the Gang of Four, the Morgon growers who pulled Beaujolais away from cheap, thin wine toward serious, age-worthy Gamay; Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley importer whose portfolio introduced them to American buyers, still brings the wines in. Since Marcel's death in 2010, his son Mathieu, who worked alongside him from 2005, and daughter Camille, who joined in 2014, have run the domaine. Like the Morgons, this wine is fermented whole cluster with native yeast and bottled unfiltered with very little sulfur after six months in tank, a direct, granite-driven Gamay for drinking young.