100% Gamay

Food pairings: Terrines and fine charcuterie, grilled sausages, roast chicken or free-range poultry with mushrooms, a mushroom tart, grilled red meats such as leg of lamb or a beef fillet, and soft-rind cheeses.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked exclusively by hand into small containers, sorted with almost surgical care, sometimes in two passes, and chilled in refrigerated trucks on the way to the cellar. The whole, intact clusters then go into the vats for a traditional Beaujolais semi-carbonic maceration with native yeasts and no added sulfur, lasting roughly 10 to 21 days depending on the parcel and the vintage. The family never acidifies, chaptalizes or uses any other additive, and follows every fermentation under the microscope. The wine finishes fermenting and ages for about nine months in 216-liter Burgundy barrels, never new, and is bottled unfiltered, either with a touch of sulfur, mainly for export, or as an unsulfured "mise nature".

Vineyards and terroir: Most of the family's vines are in Morgon, within a few kilometers of the domaine in Villié-Morgon, across a wide range of terroirs and lieux-dits, with an average age of around 70 years. They grow on poor, acidic granitic sand, the "roche pourrie" or decomposed granite typical of Morgon, which forces the roots deep and gives the wine its freshness and structure. The vines are goblet-trained and very densely planted to rein in Gamay's vigor, and they have been farmed without chemical fertilizers, herbicides or synthetic products since the 1980s, with compost and shallow plowing to keep the soils alive; the vineyards have been certified organic by Ecocert since 2004. In 2025 coulure, a summer heatwave and July hail cut the crop hard, but the vintage brought real depth of fruit and fine balance.

Family and history: The domaine dates to 1909, when Michel Lapierre settled in Villié-Morgon. His son Camille was already bottling wine under his own name in the late 1950s, and in 1973 his grandson Marcel took over the family vines. From 1981, inspired by the researcher and winemaker Jules Chauvet, Marcel began fermenting without sulfur or added yeasts and farming without chemicals, ideas that made him a pioneer and one of the founders of the natural wine movement. After Marcel's death in 2010, his son Mathieu, who had joined in 2004 after training as a chef, took over the domaine; he was joined by his sister Camille in 2013 and by their sister Anne in 2024. Today the labels read "M. & C. Lapierre".

In the pictures: The Croix du Py standing among the vines of Villié-Morgon (photo: René Boncompain, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0). The Église Saint-Vincent in the heart of Villié-Morgon, the Lapierre family's village (photo: Chabe01, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0).