100% Gamay

Food pairings: Charcuterie and cured meats, white meats, game, soft cheeses and grilled summer vegetables; a wine to enjoy throughout a meal.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked by hand and carried in small crates to keep them intact. They are vinified as whole bunches in Château Thivin's hillside cellar, whose successive levels let the estate work entirely by gravity, with no pumps or conveyors for the harvest. A short maceration captures all the freshness of the fruit, and the wine is then aged for about seven months in cement vats, without oak, before bottling.

Vineyards and terroir: Reverdon is a lieu-dit of the Brouilly appellation, facing Mont Brouilly on a hillside that looks due east, on the first foothills of the Massif Central. The soil is a friable, sandy pink granite with little organic matter, well drained and poor, which gives racy wines with very elegant fruit aromas. Two cadoles, the dry-stone huts of the vineyard workers, one of them from the 18th century, bear witness to the long history of this terroir. The vines are farmed organically, with alternating grassed and tilled strips to protect the storm-prone slope, and the well-drained soil means few treatments are needed in summer.

Family and history: Château Thivin, on the slopes of Mont Brouilly in Odenas, is the oldest estate on the mountain: the first part of the manor dates from the 14th century, and the date 1383 is still carved above a small cellar door. Zaccharie Geoffray and his wife Marguerite bought it at auction on June 8, 1877, together with the historic Clos de Brouilly vineyard, and the Geoffray family has made the wine ever since. In the 1930s Claude-Thomas Geoffray helped create the Côte de Brouilly appellation, and in 1948 the Académie Rabelais was founded in the château's harvest hall. Claude Vincent Geoffray and his wife Evelyne built the gravity-fed, multi-level vat room in the 1970s; their son Claude-Edouard and his wife Sonja, a winegrower from the Valais whom he met while studying at Changins in Switzerland, joined the estate in 2007 and are the sixth generation.

In the pictures: Autumn vineyards on the slopes of Mont Brouilly (photo: René Boncompain, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0), and the village of Cercié in the Brouilly appellation, with Mont Brouilly behind (photo: René Boncompain, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0).