Gamay

Food pairings: A fine roast poultry, pork roast with apples and chestnuts, spice-crusted salmon with roasted vegetables, or a classic Beaujolais andouillette.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked by hand and carefully sorted, then fermented as whole clusters in a semi-carbonic maceration of about three weeks, with native yeasts, gentle pump-overs and no added sulfur. The wine ages for about nine months in stoneware jars and tank, receives only a tiny dose of sulfur just before bottling, and is neither fined nor filtered.

Vineyards and terroir: Charbonnières is the domaine's great terroir, a lieu-dit at 460 meters in the hills above Fleurie. Nestled in the forest like an amphitheater high in the Beaujolais mountains, it faces east toward the Alps, with part of the vineyard turning north and part south, while the surrounding woods form a natural enclosure that cools the vines and shelters them from the wind. The densely planted, goblet-trained vines range from 30 to more than 60 years old and grow on granite bedrock, in sandy soils of pink granite mixed with weathered rock fragments and igneous rock. Farmed organically for nearly 20 years, it is by far the domaine's most labor-intensive parcel, and its wildness, full of ferns, hares, lizards, wild boar and wild strawberries, shows in the glass.

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, and in 2015 they returned from New York to create their own domaine, where they work every parcel by hand, with help from a horse and a flock of sheep.

In the pictures: The Église Saint-Martin in the village of Fleurie (photo: Chabe01, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0). The Chapelle de la Madone above the vineyards of Fleurie (photo: René Boncompain, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0).