Gamay

Food pairings: A board of charcuterie, summer barbecues, a Thai-style veal blanquette or a chicken minestrone; it is also a lovely aperitif red.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked by hand and fermented as whole clusters in a semi-carbonic maceration of about three weeks, with native yeasts and no added sulfur. The wine then ages for about nine months in stoneware jars and tank through the spring, when the two parcels are blended. Only a tiny dose of sulfur is added just before bottling, and the wine is neither fined nor filtered.

Vineyards and terroir: With its steep slopes, high-altitude plots and sandy granite soils, Chiroubles has, in the Chapels' words, more in common with the northern Rhône than with any other part of France. The domaine has farmed its Chiroubles vines since January 2018: two southeast-facing parcels in the lieux-dits Saint-Roch and Poullet, densely planted and goblet-trained, with old vines of around 40 to 60 years. From the top of Poullet you can see Mont Blanc far to the east, and across to the Côte du Py and Mont Brouilly. The soils are a mix of pink granite, sandstone and fragments of weathered igneous rock. The slopes are too steep for a tractor, so the soil is worked with a winch, a cable plow and pickaxes, at times with a local farmer and his horse; the vines are farmed organically, sheep graze the rows in winter, and fruit trees and cover crops bring life back to soils that had been worn out by years of chemical farming.

Family and history: Domaine Chapel was founded in 2016 by Michele Smith Chapel and David Chapel in Régnié-Durette. David, son of the legendary three-Michelin-star chef Alain Chapel, grew up above his father's restaurant kitchen, where vignerons such as Jules Chauvet, Marcel Lapierre, Pierre Overnoy and Gérard Chave were regular guests and friends. He worked his first harvest in 2005 with Marcel Lapierre and later worked in the vineyards and cellar at Domaine Lapierre. Michele, who grew up in Connecticut, was a sommelier at Per Se and then wine director of the Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare in New York. They met in 2013, when Mathieu Lapierre sent David to host Michele's visit to Beaujolais; after nearly three years in New York, they returned in 2015 to create their own domaine.

In the pictures: An aerial view of the steep slopes and granite amphitheaters of the Chiroubles cru (photo: Cruchiroubles, 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0). Goblet-trained vines in the lieu-dit Verdy at Chiroubles (photo: Chabe01, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0).