2021 Domaine Jean-Claude Lapalu La Croix des Rameaux Brouilly

Jean-Claude Lapalu divides wine into two categories: bottles you drink standing up at a bistro counter, and wines you sit down to contemplate. La Croix des Rameaux belongs firmly in the second. It comes from a handful of prized Brouilly parcels with vines between 60 and 90 years old, and it blurs the line between Cru Beaujolais and Côte de Nuits.

Lapalu is one of six growers who rebuilt the reputation of Beaujolais. He farms nine hectares organically and adds ten milligrams of sulfur at bottling (a truly minuscule amount) and nothing else. The hand-picked clusters get three weeks of semi-carbonic maceration, then up to eight months in seasoned oak, then a month in tank. Unfined and unfiltered.

The 2021 growing season nearly destroyed the crop. April frost hit, snow followed, May set fifty-year rainfall records, and the regional harvest came in 25 percent down and ten days late. What survived has lower alcohol and sharper acid than the hot vintages that came prior or after.

Expect black cherry, dark raspberry, violets, crushed stone, and spice, then a dense core wrapped in fine-grained tannins over a firm mineral spine.

If you think Beaujolais is weeknight wine, this bottle will quite happily offer a resounding counterargument. Roast duck, large Burgundy bowl.