Domaine de la Cure, "Gamine" 2018

Producer Profile: In the long list of wine journalists turned winemakers, there is another to look out for: Fabrice Le Glatin of the Beaujolais estate Domaine de La Cure. Since 2007, Fabrice wrote the solely natural-wine-focused French blog VinsurVin. Add to this his day job as a high school English teacher in Hauts-de-Seine and you begin to draw a picture of the man behind this newer Beaujolais venture. The winemaker-as-translator, the winemaker-as-vigneron. For Fabrice, the inspiration has always been one related to the Earth paired with a curiosity for the natural science behind what transforms grapes and must into wine itself. In this way, he is particularly an extension of the school of Jules Chauvet, one of the forefathers of natural wine. Like Fabrice, Chauvet was a writer/educator: his famous book L’esthétique du Vin a compilation of his essays on the craft of winemaking with particular attention to carbonic maceration and native yeast studies. Similarly, Chauvet made wine and was largely responsible for the popularization of low-intervention winemaking, specifically low-intervention, carbonically macerated wines made from the Gamay grape grown in the schistous granite soils of Beaujolais. All of these also match up in Fabrice’s case; he certainly is of the enormous number of winemakers who draw a kind of lineage back to Chauvet’s groundbreaking studies. In organic conversion, Fabrice works with plots of both young and old vines across several of the Cru Beaujolais regions, namely Chénas and Juliénas. His wines demonstrate a vigneron still learning his craft – they are playful and full of life, devoid of anything that smacks as pat or complacent. This is Beaujolais that searches for jovial purity of fruit and asks: what else can be achieved from this one grape grown across the many terroirs of this one inimitable place?

Vinification: 100% organic gamay. Grapes are hand-harvested, followed by fermentation through carbonic maceration in tank. Bottled unfined, unfiltered with no SO2. 

Tasting: A wine so pure of fruit and deliciously simple. Soft, floral aromatics mingle with ripe, juicy strawberry. A melange of red fruits on the palate. Light-bodied, fresh-as-can-be and perfect with a chill. This wine was made for a roast turkey.