Julien Duport, 'Les Balloquets', Brouilly

Today I’ll suggest a simple, but remarkably effective “cheat code” for anyone who loves the fragrance, finesse, and nearly weightless balance of red Burgundy but finds the region’s prices increasingly difficult to justify: buy serious Cru Beaujolais from a top grower, then give it five or six years in the cellar. Gamay will never become Pinot Noir, nor should it. But with moderate bottle age, the finest examples begin to shed their youthful primary fruit and reveal many of the qualities Burgundy drinkers prize most deeply—translucent texture, fine aromatic detail, savory complexity, mineral precision, and the ability to carry considerable flavor without ever feeling heavy. Today’s 2020 Julien Duport Brouilly “Les Balloquets” is a perfect demonstration. Now entering that wonderfully expressive middle stage between youth and maturity, it possesses the perfume and delicacy of a finely crafted Burgundian Pinot Noir, but speaks in the unmistakably exuberant, granitic dialect of old-vine Gamay grown on the steep hillsides of Brouilly.

Julien Duport’s story begins not with a fashionable natural-wine project or a newly assembled collection of purchased vineyards, but with a family connection to these hills extending back more than a century. Although his parents did not make wine, his uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather did, and Duport reportedly knew from early childhood that he would become a vigneron. He completed his studies in 2003, just as the local market for bulk Beaujolais grapes collapsed, and took responsibility for his family’s parcels at a moment when many old vineyards were being abandoned or uprooted. The domaine’s roots date to 1916, while some of its vines were planted as early as 1885; a portion survives on original French rootstock from before phylloxera. Duport now farms only a small estate, divided between Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly, and his work reflects an unusually serious commitment to preserving the agricultural and stylistic identity of these historic vineyards.

That commitment is evident in the way he farms. Many of the domaine’s old Gamay vines remain head-trained en gobelet, and Duport has returned to methods associated more closely with his grandfather’s generation than with modern commercial viticulture. He plows difficult parcels by horse and hand, maintains grass between vineyard rows, harvests manually, and works organically. His wines ferment in cement with indigenous yeasts, generally without sulfur during fermentation, and are bottled without fining or filtration. Yet it would be misleading to reduce Duport to a checklist of contemporary low-intervention practices. His wines are not made to advertise cellar ideology. They are deliberately old-fashioned Beaujolais: structured, vinous, and built for the table and cellar, with less emphasis on the overtly candied or explosively carbonic personality that has come to define so much modern Gamay.

“Les Balloquets” is one of the domaine’s most distinctive parcels. The 0.7-hectare vineyard lies on an extraordinarily steep, east-facing slope approaching 45 percent, where roughly century-old Gamay vines cling to thin volcanic granite soils threaded with quartz and amethyst. The site’s severity matters. Old vines planted on such a slope cannot produce anonymous, abundant fruit; their roots must penetrate fractured rock in search of moisture and sustenance, giving the wine a compressed mineral core beneath its natural generosity. The 2020 was fermented as whole clusters using traditional semi-carbonic methods, with a comparatively long fifteen-to-eighteen-day maceration, then aged for eighteen months in neutral barrels. Only 3,000 bottles were produced. This combination of ancient vines, prolonged maceration, and patient élevage explains why the wine feels so much more complete and architectural than the frivolous image of Brouilly might suggest.

Six years after harvest, the 2020 “Les Balloquets” has reached a beautiful point in its evolution. The color remains a luminous ruby-purple, but the nose has begun to move beyond simple fruit into a far more intricate register of black cherry, wild strawberry, crushed raspberry, dried rose, peony, bay leaf, cracked pepper, warm granite, and subtle forest floor. On the palate, it is both supple and wonderfully disciplined, with finely resolved tannins, vibrant acidity, and a cool, stony line running beneath the ripe fruit of the warm 2020 vintage. There is real concentration here, but it is concentration without weight—the wine seems to expand through perfume and persistence rather than mass. The finish is long, saline, and quietly savory, leaving impressions of cherry skin, violet, iron, and dried herbs. Serve it around 58°F in a medium Burgundy stem and give it twenty minutes of air. With a simple, classic steak tartare, it offers exactly the kind of aromatic correspondence and featherweight intensity that makes mature red Burgundy so compelling. Tartare is actually one of the finest pairings imaginable for this wine because it highlights exactly what mature Cru Beaujolais does best. The raw beef amplifies the wine's delicate iron-like minerality, while the capers, shallots, Dijon mustard, and egg yolk echo Gamay's savory, peppery complexity without overwhelming its remarkably fine structure. Unlike a heavier Cabernet or Syrah, this Brouilly has the freshness and featherweight balance to refresh the palate after each bite, allowing the sweetness of the beef and the perfume of the wine to elevate one another. It's a pairing rooted in the great bistros of Lyon and Beaujolais itself.