100% Gamay

Food pairings: Duck, squab and other poultry, especially with a rich plum sauce, roast pork, a board of charcuterie, and strong cheeses.

Winemaking: Château des Jacques has never used carbonic maceration. Its wines are made in the Burgundian way: the grapes are picked and sorted by hand and usually destemmed, a technique the estate was among the first in Beaujolais to adopt, so they can macerate slowly for three to four weeks without picking up green tannins from the stems. Nothing is added, and native yeasts carry out the fermentation, with punch-downs and pump-overs adjusted to the vintage. The wine then ages for ten months in the estate's 17th-century vaulted cellar, in a mix of new and one- or two-year-old barrels made from French oak from the Allier, Limousin and Nivernais forests.

Vineyards and terroir: The Côte du Py is the emblematic terroir of Morgon, the appellation's only true hill, rising above the village of Villié-Morgon. Its soils are made of bluish rock born of an ancient underwater volcano, older still than the pink granite of Moulin-à-Vent, and poorer than the surrounding slopes, which gives a richer, more powerful Gamay with notes of white pepper and blackberry. Château des Jacques acquired its vines here in 2001, and the estate is working toward organic viticulture.

Family and history: Château des Jacques, a 17th-century house on the lieu-dit Les Jacques in Romanèche-Thorins, was once a resting place on the pilgrims' route to Santiago de Compostela. In 1924 it was bought by Amédée Rousseau, an entrepreneur who spent three years buying vines in Moulin-à-Vent from 70 different families and introduced pioneering methods for the region: destemming, vinification by parcel, long macerations, barrel aging and bottling at the estate. The Thorin family carried on his vision of a noble, age-worthy Gamay, and in 1996 passed the château to the Kopf family, owners of Maison Louis Jadot in Beaune. The estate keeps its own team, vines, winery and methods; the winery was fully renovated in 2017, and since January 2023 it has been run by winemaker and director Julie Pitoiset.

In the pictures: The Côte du Py hill rising above Villié-Morgon in autumn (photo: Lulunantua, 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0). Old bush-trained Gamay vines in Morgon in early spring (photo: Jameson Fink, 2013, CC BY 2.0).