Description

Just in time to add festivity and deliciousness to your holiday table.  The 2025 Beaujolais vintage is defined by precision, vibrant freshness, and healthy Gamay grapes.  2025 is widely considered the region’s best and most consistent harvest since the superb 2022.

Completely unlike the quaffing nouveau, and the standard easy drinking Beaujolais Village wines that have permeated the American markets for years, our Beaujolais offerings are a “completely different animal” – very specific terroir driven estate wines from single vineyard sites that are capable of cellaring at least 5-10+ years.  They deserve a place in every serious collector’s cellar. In fact, you should make it a point to include this region, which lies closer to the Rhone Valley than Burgundy, in any of your travel plans.

We just scored a couple of cases of the very rare 2025 Jean-Paul Thevenet Morgon Vielles Vignes (Old Vines)…..only about 2,000 cases are produced, but little gets into the US market.    Below is a list of all the pertinent bullets!  I know if you like Pinot Noir and Burgs this is going to have great appeal to you.

Jean Paul picked up where his father left off until a childhood friend convinced him to return to pre-industrial ways of farming and winemaking. Marcel Lapierre, who also ran a domaine in Villié-Morgon, had been experimenting with natural vinifications of organically farmed fruit with promising results, guided by the mentorship of local biochemist and vigneron Jules Chauvet. With Lapierre’s counsel, Thévenet began by eliminating synthetic treatments in his vines and in 1981 made a first attempt at producing a natural wine, using ripe, hand-harvested fruit fermented whole-cluster with vineyard yeasts, very little added sulfur, and no chaptalization. His first successful vintage came in 1985, and it would take years of additional tastings, discussions, and late nights with Lapierre and two other local boys, “P’tit Jean” Foillard and Guy “P’tit Max” Breton, before Jean Paul (known as “Paul-Po”) would achieve consistency with his new methods. The Gang of Four, as Kermit later dubbed the Villié-Morgon rebels, soon began winning over hearts and palates with their fine, perfumed, terroir-driven Morgons.

Growing up at the domaine, Jean Paul’s son Charly took an early interest in vigneron life, and specifically the world of natural wine. As a teenager, he worked in Marcel Lapierre’s cellar for three years before returning home to help his father. It was upon Charly’s impetus that Jean Paul began tilling his vineyards in 2000, finally investing in the necessary equipment to work the soil mechanically. In 2006, eager to strike out on his own, Charly purchased his own vines in the neighboring cru of Régnié, in which he introduced biodynamic practices.

Father and son now work together under one label, carrying forth Jean Paul’s vision of pure and profound Beaujolais from old vines via sustainable farming and low-intervention winemaking. The Thévenets’ plush, mouth-filling Morgon and spicy, stony Régnié are a testament to their status as natural wine pioneers, definitively cementing their legacy in the Beaujolais hall of fame.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION