Send an e-mail to Joe Dressner, The Wine Importer
Click to Read An Exciting Exposé of The Three Tier Schnook System!
Click Here to Speed to the Non-Fictional Louis/Dressner Selections Website
My Friend André Iché, An Appreciation
View current page...more recent posts
Jean-Paul Brun's Beautiful 2007 Beaujolais l'Ancienne Denied the AOC Beaujolais!
Can you imagine the stupidity!
Jean-Paul Brun just learned that 5,222 cases of Beaujolais l' Ancienne 2007 have been deemed as being atypical by the French wine police.
I've enjoyed a bunch of these bottles. They are fruity and elegant and a true pleasure to drink. So what's wrong?
They were not made with the miserable thermo vinification technique that Georges Duboeuf and the Beaujolais Establishment has decided is typical. The wine was not made with enzymes and cultured years but comes only from what the earth and the vine brought into the bottle. It was not made at high yields or high chaptalization, but is a real and natural wine.
This year, we at Louis/Dressner are importing more and more Vins de Table and wines without the AOC agreement. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the small minority of natural winemakers to continue to work in the context of the AOC because the AOCs want to enforce a uniform and medicore style with no tolerance for originality and authenticity.
The entirety of the Southern Beaujolais is suffering and only a few estates working authentically are still selling well. While their neighbors pull out vines to make way for housing developments for Lyonais looking to live in the country, the Bruns and Chermettes continue to prosper.
To persecute the Jean-Paul Bruns of the Beaujolais (already Marcel Lapierre, Jean-Paul Thévenent and Georges Descombes have had problems) will only hasten the decline of the Beaujolais region.
Are the wines of Jean-Paul Brun and Marcel Lapierre plunging the Beaujolais into economic ruin? Just the opposite, those are the growers who have prospered because their wines have stepped out of the industrial cookie cutter pushed by Duboeuf and the Beaujolais authorities.
People buy Terres Dorées and all the best producers of the Beaujolais because they know that those growers are the true defenders of the Beaujolais' terroir. The overwhelming mediocracy of the region has become so depressing that the official authorities see no choice but to strike back at the few successful growers who continue to make distinctive and grand vin.
At this point, I am not certain if the wine will be released as Vin de Pay or Vin de Table. All I know is that it will continue to be an immensely enjoyable wine.
The problem is will the market continue to buy the wines because it no longer has a Beaujolais label?
Let's hope people will reject this bullyish and ridiculous measure on the part of the AOC.