First launched in 2021, this follow-on vintage is even better and represents superb value. A much smaller production then either the Morgon on Raisin Gaulois, around 900 cases are made from 2.5 hectares of vines from just outside the Morgon appellation. The vines here have never been sprayed by herbicides or pesticides and are now around 70 years old, which is a pretty serious pedigree for AC Beaujolais. Wax caps, and that silky texture that is so key to the Lapierre style. With a few years under it’s belt now and drinking more like a top-class Morgon, this is one to go long on.

The philosophy is to look after the soil and then interfere as little as possible. While growers around him were adopting herbicides, Chauvet warned Marcel off them and encouraged him to make wine without sulphur dioxide. Although other people were working in this fashion before him, the influence of Marcel’s work is everywhere. His friends and followers started a galaxy of other wine estates to further the philosophy. Whist they were pathfinding wines in the 1980s and early 1990s, now they are relatively mainstream – and this suits them, as Mathieu Lapierre puts it this: “Natural wine is a freedom to do what we want – a freedom to not all do the eame things”

The vines are farmed organically, and only clean, whole bunches are brought into the winery, where the wines ferment in wooden vats and mature in older oak with no additions. Marcel died in 2010, and his children now run the domaine without changing the way the wines are made.

“A darker fruit here – small aromatic but even more impressive. More concentrated, faintly tannic without grain. Easing beautifully over the palate – that’s a really great Beaujolais – Bravo!“ – Top Wine. Bill Nanson