100% Gamay

Food pairings: Roast chicken with its pan juices, roast pork or pork loin with apples, coq au vin and other dishes in sauce, red meats, grilled sausages with mustard, charcuterie with cornichons, a mushroom and thyme galette, or roasted salmon with lentils.

Winemaking: The grapes are picked by hand and fermented as whole clusters in the traditional Beaujolais way: a semi-carbonic maceration of about ten days in cement vats, with only native yeasts. The wine is then aged in cement, which keeps the fruit pure and lifted. Serve at 14 to 16°C (57 to 61°F); it will keep for five to seven years.

Vineyards and terroir: The Gamay vines, about 60 years old, grow in an amphitheater of hillside vineyards at around 350 meters in Juliénas, in the far north-west of the Beaujolais. The soils are granite-based, stony and mixed with ancient alluvial deposits, some sand and a fair amount of clay, and lie on a bedrock of the region's volcanic "blue stone", which gives the wine its mineral backbone; the main exposure is to the south-east. The vines are densely planted and farmed sustainably, without herbicides or pesticides. The history of Juliénas and neighboring Jullié goes back more than 2,000 years, and both villages are said to take their names from Julius Caesar.

Family and history: The Tête family, based at "Les Gonnards" in Juliénas, has been growing wine here for four generations. It all began in the 1920s with Francis Tête, a cooper and cellar master, who handed it on in the 1940s to his son Raymond, a pioneer of selling bottled wine directly from the estate. Raymond's son Michel, who studied winemaking in Beaune, started out with a few rented vines in 1978, settled in 1980, greatly enlarged the domaine and gave it the name Domaine du Clos du Fief in 1988, with his wife Françoise looking after the administration. Their son Sylvain joined in 2014 after studying viticulture and enology and working harvests abroad, including at First Creek in Australia's Hunter Valley, and in 2015 father and son founded Michel et Sylvain Tête together. Michel Tête is widely regarded as one of the finest producers in Juliénas, and the family stays true to low yields, careful farming and classic winemaking.

In the pictures: The village of Juliénas, surrounded by its vineyards (photo: Sunappu-shashin, 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0). The church of Juliénas rising above the vines (photo: Chabe01, 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0).