100% Gamay

Food pairings: All kinds of meat and poultry, especially roast duck and other fowl, and smoked duck breast.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked by hand at full ripeness and vinified in the traditional Beaujolais way, as whole bunches in a semi-carbonic maceration of 10 to 12 days in concrete vats, with native yeasts and pump-overs twice a day. The wine is then aged for six to eight months, 90% in recent oak foudres and 10% in new oak barrels. It is built to age, with a window of about three to ten years and a peak between three and six.

Vineyards and terroir: Les Garants is one of the most noble granite terroirs of the Fleurie cru, in the northeast of the appellation on the border with Moulin-à-Vent, and the site was once classified as Moulin-à-Vent. The vines, about 45 years old and trained in the traditional gobelet style, face southwest on pink granite rich in mica and quartz, a sunny exposure that gives a concentrated, dense and long wine with intense, lively, sappy fruit. The family's work in the vineyard is certified HVE level 3 (High Environmental Value).

Family and history: The family has been rooted at Le Vissoux, in Saint-Vérand in the south of Beaujolais, since at least 1636, the date of the oldest record of the Vissoux family, which still appears on the capsule. Pierre-Marie Chermette took over the estate in 1982, at 22, and began bottling his own wine; from 1986 he and his wife Martine championed traditional, unchaptalized Beaujolais made with native yeasts. In 1994 they were among the first growers from the south of the region to buy vines in the crus, and in 1996 they bought their plot in Fleurie Les Garants. The Domaine du Vissoux became Famille Chermette, and since 2023 their son Jean-Etienne has run the estate, making the wines together with his father.

In the pictures: The Chapelle de la Madone above the vineyards of Fleurie (photo: René Boncompain, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0), and gobelet-trained vines on the heights between Chénas and Fleurie (photo: john147j, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0).