Julie Balagny

Here comes our favorite winemaker! Every year we are happy to get a few bottles, which is not easy. Because Julie lives on the planet Beaujolais and to reach it, it only helps to travel there yourself. From the vine to the cellar work, she is dedicated heart and soul to making the wine she loves. And what a wine it is! With her, Gamay finds one of its most beautiful expressions, we think. Demanding it is, yet comforting, with electrifying flavors.

Julie, a Parisian by birth, spent years making wine for acquaintances in the southeast and south of France before finding favorable vineyards in Beaujolais in 2009. A wine region whose reputation for production excesses was shot. Thanks to dedicated characters like Julie, this gentle landscape is being given a new lease of life. Julie's venerable gnarled Gamay vines are rooted in an 8-hectare estate in Fleurie. Of these, the En Remont parcel is a very special place, with 3.5 hectares of steep slopes surrounded by meadows and forest. She later acquired 1 hectare of Beaujolais Villages and a little less than a hectare of Moulin-à-Vent, and now farms around 5 hectares from her terroir.

The manual labor in the vineyard is arduous on the steep and densely planted terrain. It's clear that it takes something like Julie's exuberant energy to make free-range wine here. Every visit to her farm is impressive, a grand old masonry that she has outfitted with archaic utensils that make the specialness of her wines possible. The cellar work revolves around the carbonic maceration typical of Beaujolais, in which the whole grape is fermented with stem and stalk in a large concrete tank. Julie always gives her all to meet the daily workload and counteract the unpredictability of winemaking. This energy seems to live on in the bottle and combines brilliantly with the equally incisive delicacy of her wines.