Julien Duport - Beaujolais, France
Photo from our 2017 visit: Julien Duport atop Côte Du Brouilly.
“Do you know Julien Duport??”
(- Guillaume Chanudet)
A NEW GAMAY VOICE FOR AMERICA
(3/23/18 Odenas and Marchampt)
Two fourth generation Beaujolais growers stood waiting for us in the gravel driveway in Marchampt, chatting and spitting and swirling heavenly little pours of Beaujolais blanc. Julien Duport, whose wines we introduce to the United States today (with this very email!), and Nicolas Chemarin, whose wines we introduced to the US market four or five years back. They of course know each other, two young visionaries. Ahead of us was a day of tasting Gamay, lunching monstrously, and wondering about how tradition stays alive. These two crackle with energy about what Beaujolais is now.
Two songs inhabited the same air that day — Do It Again by Eartha Kitt and Again by Etta James. It’s hard to understand Beaujolais without thinking about music, that wily siren of change, and inhabitor of the now. Beaujolais brims with melody and voice cracks and years of finesse and practice and performance, sometimes to sound more raw. Always it seems to ache to sound more itself. For a long time, Beaujolais’s attempt to sound more like itself involved producing seas of fun, repetitive, juicy and uninteresting but easy-to-sell, easy-to-drink wines.
A generation passed and people started to think it was tradition. Carbonic maceration (the fermentation technique Beaujolais made famous, when grapes ferment whole cluster in a CO2-rich environment) in Beaujolais is like amplification in rock music. The alcoholic fermentation plays out within each grape rather than in the liquid as a whole — at its best it makes fruit louder. The process of fermenting with stems quiets acid and integrates tannin into wine more subtly. Just like amplification, carbonic maceration doesn’t make wine better unless there’s substance to the raw material as well — there are seas of uninteresting carbonic Beaujolais in the same way that there are droves of people who own guitar amps. In the last 30 years this is how most people have come to know Beaujolais. That trapped CO2 can be tinny and feedbacky, scraping your ears, or it can turn the volume up all the way. You hear what you can’t when it’s quiet. Some people think it’s a cheap or overused trick and some people don’t care and other people love it. Everyone agrees they walk hand in hand. Just like rock and roll isn’t all amplification, Beaujolais isn’t all carbonic maceration. But yeah, it changed things.
If it was the Eartha Kitt song, Beaujolais was the do it again, I may cry no no no, but do it again. The grapes were crying out to be something else. But if no one would listen hard enough, it was plenty just to be wine, and pleasurable enough! The latest iteration of wines in Beaujolais speak soulfully about where and when they’re from. With growers like Guillaume Chanudet, Julien Duport and Nicolas Chemarin, the Beaujolais starts to sing with that throaty fullness in itself, Again / This couldn't happen again / This is that once in a lifetime / This is the thrill divine / What’s more /This never happened before.
Julien Duport’s father was not a vigneron, but a fireman, un pompier. The estate planted by his grandfather and great-grandfather remained in the family, however, igniting Julien’s imagination from an early age. For Julien, work is not about putting things out but setting them on fire. At the young age of 21, Julien took over the farming — although since the age of 4 he knew he wanted to be a vigneron. He completed an undergraduate degree in enology at local Bel Air college and worked with winemaker Laurent Martray and others. His first commercial vintage was in 2003. It took us until 2016 to catch wind of Julien’s majestic wines.
Julien said the winemaking gene skipped a generation—in French, “sauter une generation.” More literally, jumped. So how did it land? We think gracefully and joyfully, the wines are balletic and muscular with a twinkle in their eye. They are happy to finally be dancing. Julien’s personal discovery of winemaking and reinvigoration of the family estate comes with a reverence for tradition. In order to reclaim the identity of the land, he believes that it’s important to work by hand. As a most charming smile dawns across his face, he says he farms with a horse-led plow “parce que c’est mon plaisir” — it is his pleasure. When these traditions jump generations there’s a risk of forgetting. Julien is a careful steward, careful to correctly describe his work during our meeting. Like a good teacher, he checks in with us to make sure we understand what he’s saying. Muscle memory is a good way of remembering, but it’s important to understand that tradition isn’t just the simple repetition of technique for the sake of repeating. He repeats for a reason.
Julien works with a reverence for the land in anticipation of new expressions. From his hilly perch in Odenas the whole countryside is visible (fans of Beaujolais from Brouilly may be amused to know Julien's small Odenas estate looks down on the famed Chateau Thivin). The skies are big enough to make you start dreaming. Julien’s interest is not merely in bringing the past to the future, but in bringing variegation to our understanding of Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly, Brouilly being the largest cru in Beaujolais. Within the context of Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly, Julien’s attention to his land is singular and a voice we haven’t heard before.
(some young-ish vines - around 40 years)
La Folie is Julien’s property in Brouilly. The vineyard is planted on a slope below Mount Saburin facing full east, with full sun in the morning. As you walk across the terrain the ground crunches pleasantly with bits of pink granite gravel underfoot. This vineyard is nearly all granite-based soils, something Julien returns to again and again in our conversation. The capabilities of the granite captivate him: the pink granite of Brouilly holds onto heat even as the day cools down, which evens out the ripening process of the gamay across a longer period of time. It also works to tame the acid in the wine. creating pleasant structure and volume in the wines. Julien likens the granite of Brouilly and certain northern Rhone terroirs like Condrieu and Côte Rotie. He makes a point of telling us that this granite is pinker than Rhone granite, because they were formed from different plate activity. Like much of Beaujolais, the vines are planted in a gobelet-style, head trained planting. Walking through the vines in March, the vines looked like twisted, animal snarls.
We also visit La Boucheratte in Côte de Brouilly, the schist-inflected island of Mount Brouilly within the appellation Brouilly. This vineyard is planted to vines aged 102 years old and results in a wine more complex and black than any Beaujolais in memory. This site was tended by horse up until 1985 and then again when Julien took control. Here he has a little bit of palissage, where the vines are on wires, double cordon de royat style. It’s incredible that vines this old are producing at all anymore, and all the more incredible when you taste the La Boucheratte. Part of the wine’s intensity comes from the windiness of the site, which leads the gamay skins to get tough and thick and filled with tannin. Julien repeatedly used a word charnoux (which shares a root with the word for meat or flesh) to describe this wine. Rather than coaxing an extraction of this site, he has unearthed a fleshy representation of La Boucheratte in this wine. He completely rejects the homogenization of Beaujolais in general and Côte de Brouilly in particular with this wine.
Julien dreams of planting syrah and viognier in the vineyards someday. This dream is his bequest to the living world of Brouilly and Beaujolais as a whole, his contribution to making the soil and the terroir more well-known. Carbonic started as an experiment, now considered traditional within a generation or so. The only thing stopping him at this point are AOC laws, but they can change in time. He loves these Rhône wines and experiences them with fondness because the soils are cousins of his.
(old barrels chez Julien Duport, les saucissons drying above)
(finally, gracing our counter)
Tradition is restless and dull when it is too instructive. One could tell in tasting with Chemarin and Duport at the same time that they felt the presence of the older generation differently. Chemarin is rebellious, his father makes wine and is still very much a part of daily affairs. Chemarin’s way of making the wine his own is bucking the expectation that Beaujolais-Villages wines be unimpressive (because his Rocher vineyard in Marchampt is not a recognized cru). But Julien is protective of the gift of tradition, preserving ancient ways of farming. He raises pigs and chickens and even makes saucisson in a traditional method that he serves up with his wines in his 1760 farmhouse. His sweet little son walks up to the tasting partway through, big sweet eyes and buckteeth, accustomed and maybe destined to be a part of this eventually.
Beaujolais has always been about joyousness in wines made close to the earth. Gamay is too humble to compete with pinot noir, its princely cousin to the north. What’s beautiful about this moment in Beaujolais is that it has become a developed expression of itself without emulating anything but itself. The song “Again” is something of a jazz standard, but Etta James’s version, with a bit more vibrato in the voice and dirt on its boots has more of her. This moment in Beaujolais is about the region finally meeting itself. It’s about choosing to do something someone else has done because that first person’s reasons were well-chosen and made sense. It’s about being careful with things because they matter and because they work and because the past couldn’t happen again. It’s about tradition meaning that you also have the power to make well-chosen decisions if you take the time to study. How real tradition means to live as yourself with the vibrance of the people you admire. You might just learn more about the ground you’re standing on, the earnest truth that there will never be any more perfection than there is now. There’s no point in doing it again. We’ll have this moment forever, but never, never again.
(LB)
Click on each wine for more detail.