Powerful? No. Intense? Not really. Terroir-driven? Yes and no. Recommended? Highly. By many standards, the famous Morgon produced by the late Marcel Lapierre shouldn’t make as much of an impression as it does. Yet this clear, delicate Gamay is a wine of singular suppleness and pleasure, with light, airy structure, a lovely red fruit, some slightly earthy notes, and a tendency to disappear remarkably fast from your glass. And herein lies the true power of Lapierre Morgon: it just drinks itself effortlessly; a characteristic the French would call gouleyant. And with some charcuterie, a simple roast chicken or a pork roast, it becomes an intrinsic component of a successful meal.
So here I was, last spring, talking away with the recently-departed Marcel Lapierre, the Beaujolais vigneron who was one of the dominant figures of the natural wine movement in its strictest definition—organic in the vineyard, wine made with grape juice only, nothing added (not even sulfur), nothing taken out. And as we got into discussing the risks of wild fermentations without sulfur, I asked him what he recommended doing if a fermentation went off in the wrong direction, with undesirable microorganisms like Brettanomyces taking over the wine’s development.
So here I was, last spring, talking away with the recently-departed Marcel Lapierre, the Beaujolais vigneron who was one of the dominant figures of the natural wine movement in its strictest definition—organic in the vineyard, wine made with grape juice only, nothing added (not even sulfur), nothing taken out. And as we got into discussing the risks of wild fermentations without sulfur, I asked him what he recommended doing if a fermentation went off in the wrong direction, with undesirable microorganisms like Brettanomyces taking over the wine’s development.
The natural wine world lost one of its leading figures, Sunday night, when Beaujolais winemaker Marcel Lapierre died after a long battle with melanoma. From his vineyards in the Morgon cru of Beaujolais, Lapierre had become a champion of natural wine, strictly defined as organic in the vineyard, and wild yeast fermentations with nothing taken out and nothing added in, including SO2.