Justin Dutraive Beaujolais Les Tours Saint-Etienne la Varenne 2024
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The Land
Saint-Étienne-la-Varenne is a Beaujolais-Villages commune that presses right up against the Brouilly boundary, which means the village keeps a Villages label while farming slopes that behave like cru land. Les Tours comes from hillside vines there, on the decomposed granite that defines the southern crus. Granite drains hard and holds heat poorly, which is exactly what Gamay wants: it forces the vine to work, keeps yields honest, and puts a stony, mineral spine under fruit that can otherwise go soft. The exposure is a genuine slope rather than valley flat, and the position near Brouilly gives more structure and darker fruit than the flatter parcels below Fleurie where Justin Dutraive started.
The Wine
Gamay, farmed organically, and handled with unusual care from the moment it is cut. Fruit is picked into small bins and refrigerated before it goes into vat, which gets whole, cold, intact berries into the tank, the precondition for a clean semi-carbonic maceration. Fermentation happens in a sphere-shaped fiberglass tank mounted on an axis: rather than pumping over, Justin rotates the entire vessel, most often in the final days of maceration, building texture without grinding tannin out of the skins. The result is black cherry and cassis, crushed violet, wild thyme and a chalky, iron-flecked finish, with more grip than the appellation's reputation for lean wines suggests. 2024 was brutal in Beaujolais. Cool, wet weather in April and May delayed flowering, mildew and black rot pressure ran high through early summer, hail arrived at the end of June, and many growers brought in a fraction of a normal crop. What was bottled came out of severe selection and shows the lifted, light-footed side of Gamay.
The People
Justin Dutraive is the eldest son of Jean-Louis Dutraive, and the family home and Domaine de la Grand'Cour in Fleurie are the same building. He grew up inside the conversation, with Jean Foillard, Yvon Métras and Sylvain Chanudet at the table. He interned with Foillard and Julie Balagny, worked harvests in Australia and in Oregon's Willamette Valley with Bill Holloran, then returned to work alongside his father. This is his own label, not a négociant bottling off the family domaine: he made his first solo vintage in 2015 from a leased plot below Fleurie that nobody else wanted and that was otherwise headed for the bulldozer. The whole domaine runs under two hectares, with only a few thousand bottles of each cuvée. He still works at Grand'Cour.
Food Pairing
Coq au vin with plenty of lardons; duck breast with a sour cherry pan sauce; a mushroom and Comté tart; steak frites with béarnaise. The acidity handles the fat, the fine granite tannin gives the duck and steak something to push against, and the wine's herbal edge picks up thyme and bay in a braise. Chill it 20 minutes. It is the red for the dinner you actually cooked.
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Weather shipping advisory: Orders placed during times of extreme heat or extreme cold will be held for no charge until more favorable weather returns.
Beaujolais stands on its own as a unique source of the world's greatest Gamay wines and one of the birthplaces of the natural wine movement. The 10 crus on the north side provide the most serious versions including Morgon and Moulin-a-Vent, but the more basic reds further south are vibrant and affordable. There's also a rare white made from Chardonnay.
Beaujolais
A red wine grape most associated with Beaujolais, Gamay makes fresh, fruity red wines with berry and violet aromas. It is grown around the world outside of France where it is often a darker and less tannic cousin to Pinot Noir in cool climate regions such as Oregon and Victoria.
