Nathalie Banes arrived in the Beaujolais hills of Oingt with a clear idea: make serious, unmanipulated Gamay that respects the land above all else. She released her first vintage in 2015 after working alongside Loire natural wine figures and completing her own transition away from conventional farming.
The Region
Nathalie Banes works at Oingt, in the Beaujolais Vert, the green, hilly northern pocket of the appellation, at roughly 500 meters elevation. The calcareous clay soils here retain moisture and provide a cooler growing environment than the granitic south, giving Gamay a crisper, more structured profile than the glou-glou image the region is often saddled with.
Vineyards & Farming
Banes tends approximately 4 hectares of Gamay vines, working entirely by horse. All treatments in the vineyard are natural, with no synthetic inputs of any kind. Her philosophy is unambiguous: as she has said, the vinification is 15 days of the year and the rest is in the vines.
Winemaking
She vinifies at Julien Merle's cellar in the nearby village of Legny. Rather than using the traditional semi-carbonic maceration typical in Beaujolais, Banes opts for a Burgundian-style whole-cluster approach that draws more structure and depth from the fruit. Wines are neither fined nor filtered, and no sulfur is added at any stage.
The Wines
The Nathalie Banes cuvees include La Saolee, a Beaujolais tout-court that shows clay-driven tension and genuine aging potential, and Nathalitre, bottled in a one-liter format. Both express the altitude and cooler soils of Oingt rather than the ripe, fruit-forward style most associated with the appellation.
