2024 Domaine Jean Foillard - Morgon Cote du Py (750ml)

Jean Foillard's flagship wine has always been Côte du Py, drawn from the slope that many consider the single greatest terroir in all of Beaujolais. Foillard took over his father's domaine in 1980 with his wife, Agnès, and soon fell in with Jules Chauvet, the region's great natural-wine theorist, alongside three other Morgon vignerons, Marcel Lapierre, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton, a group the American importer Kermit Lynch nicknamed the "Gang of Four." Their shared insistence on organic farming, late harvests, rigorous grape selection, and winemaking free of chaptalization and heavy sulfur helped restore Beaujolais's reputation as a serious wine region rather than a source of cheap, industrial Nouveau. Foillard's vines on Côte du Py average around sixty years old, some approaching a century, farmed across roughly fourteen hectares total.

Côte du Py sits on an alluvial fan of decomposed blue granite and schist, known locally as roche pourrie, or "rotten rock," at the highest point above the village of Villié-Morgon. The grapes are hand harvested without destemming, cold soaked, and undergo a traditional carbonic maceration with native yeasts over three to four weeks, then age for six to nine months in used oak barrels sourced from top Burgundy estates before bottling without fining or filtration.

The wine offers earthy stone, plum, dark cherry, and floral spice. The palate is silky and structured, mineral-driven with dusty tannins and a long evolution in the glass, often compared to a Vosne-Romanée for its perfume and texture. It pairs beautifully with roast poultry, charcuterie, or mushroom dishes.