M & C Lapierre Raisins Gaulois 2025

Domaine Marcel Lapierre is one of the most historically significant estates in French natural wine. The family has been making wine in Villié-Morgon in the Beaujolais for generations, with roots dating back over five centuries. Marcel Lapierre took over the domaine from his father in 1973 and, following a transformative encounter with the researcher, chemist, and winemaker Jules Chauvet in 1981, began making wine without synthetic inputs, commercial yeasts, chaptalization, or added sulfur — a set of principles that put him at odds with the dominant industrial approach of the time.

Marcel joined with three other local vignerons — Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton — to form what Kermit Lynch later christened the "Gang of Four," a group whose commitment to old-vine, organically farmed, naturally vinified Beaujolais helped lay the foundations of the contemporary natural wine movement. The Gang called for a return to practices that had largely been abandoned: late harvesting, rigorous sorting, carbonic maceration with indigenous yeasts, and minimal use of sulfur dioxide.

Marcel passed away in October 2010, at the end of the harvest. His son Mathieu and daughter Camille now run the domaine together, extending the family's biodynamic practices and maintaining the same standards of precision and care their father established. The estate today spans around 16 to 18 hectares in the Villié-Morgon and Côte du Py communes, farmed organically since 1981. The Morgon and Camille bottlings represent the domaine's top expressions, aged on fine lees in old oak foudres; Raisins Gaulois, the entry-level cuvée from young vines, represents the accessible, fruit-driven face of the same philosophy.

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Beaujolais is a wine region in eastern France, immediately south of Burgundy and north of Lyon, stretching roughly 55 kilometres along the western bank of the Saône river. The region is planted almost entirely with Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc, a variety that thrives in the granitic soils of the northern Beaujolais hills and produces wines ranging from the simple and grapey to the structured and age-worthy.

The geology of Beaujolais divides the region cleanly. The northern half, the Haut-Beaujolais, is built on decomposed granite and schist — ancient, mineral-poor, acidic soils that stress the vine naturally and concentrate aromatic character in the fruit. This is where all ten Crus Beaujolais are located, including Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, and Brouilly, each with its own soil character and expression. The southern half, closer to Lyon, sits on limestone and clay — fertile soils that produce the lighter wines of the generic Beaujolais AOC.

Morgon, where Domaine Marcel Lapierre is based in the village of Villié-Morgon, is one of the most distinctive and age-worthy of the ten crus. Its most celebrated terroir is the Côte du Py, a volcanic hill composed of blue schist and decomposed granite known locally as "rotten rock" — a geological formation that imparts unusual depth, dark fruit character, and structure to the wines. Morgon's wines are among the most structured of the crus and have a documented capacity to develop over a decade or more.

The traditional winemaking method of Beaujolais is carbonic maceration, where whole uncrushed grape bunches are placed in a sealed vat under CO2, allowing fermentation to begin inside the intact berry. This technique preserves fruit aromatics and minimises tannic extraction. It was the foundation of the natural wine movement that Marcel Lapierre and the Gang of Four championed from the early 1980s, reclaiming the method from the industrial Nouveau trade and restoring it to its original quality-focused purpose.