Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Maconnais winemakers shifting gears
A quick two autoroute exits south of the southern end of Burgundy’s Cote d’Or, and you land in the river town of Tournus, greeted by a tire store and a McDonald’s. This is the start of the Maconnais — not far from the famed heart of Burgundy, but in spirit, a world away.
Once upon a time, when wine largely revolved around France, the Maconnais was a reliable place to find chardonnay. You encountered its wines if you drank something labeled Macon-Villages, PouillyFuisse, Saint-Veran or maybe Vire-Clesse (the last approved in 1999, as the region’s fortunes were on the wane). They were fruity and more generous than the often-stoic white wines of northern Burgundy. If they tasted more basic, that was by design.
For decades, they helped to bulk up the rosters of large Burgundy merchants — bottles that kept shelves full and offered a weeknight drink. Maybe they didn’t have the cachet of Chablis. But if you wanted a decent chardonnay, touched by the wand of Burgundy, Macon wines were there.
Of course, that world is long gone, which is why I recently found myself back in the Maconnais, trying to figure out what comes next. Chardonnay is grown in nearly every wine-producing country, leaving wines like Macon-Villages without any special flair.
They’re not cheap enough to compete with the oceans of inoffensive chardonnay from elsewhere. It’s understandable why their fortunes waned.
Except that’s starting to change. A handful of forward-thinking vintners are overcoming the region’s perennial inferiority complex, hoping that it will be seen in a different way. They envision a future guided by better, often organic, farming and defined as much by red wine as white. And their white wines largely trade the generic bottles of the past for distinctive wines from specific villages and vineyards. It’s an acknowledgment that the region’s best parts share the same hillside plantings and limestone soils that made the Cote d’Or so special.
“When you think about the Maconnais, people think of Macon-Villages, of a flat ocean of vines,” says Jean-Philippe Bret, who with his brothers MarcAntoine and Jean-Guillaume created the ascendant Bret Brothers label. “And it’s not flat.”
Let’s stick with geography for a moment, because it explains a lot about the region’s mixed fortunes. The city of Macon and surrounding countryside are squeezed in a complicated spot: Burgundy’s most famous dirt sits to the north, while to the south lies Beaujolais, whose northern edge touches the southernmost Maconnais towns. Historically, the area’s farmers aligned their fortunes more north than south; in the 16th-century era of Louis XIII, historian Roger Dion has pointed out, the Maconnais proclaimed their winemaking “superior in dignity” to their southern neighbors.
Their fortunes largely lay to the north too. Large Burgundy negociants such as Louis Jadot (but large Beaujolais merchants too) bought a lot of wine from local growers and co-ops to bottle under their own names, enough that relatively few Macon growers bottled wines themselves. The wines became defined by that fruity, anodyne style — often, points out Caroline Gon, with Californialike sugar left to soften the wine. “We want a cleaner, more pure style than that,” says Gon, who with her husband, Frantz Chagnoleau, is part of the new generation.
These forward-thinking winemakers have watched the white wines of the Cote become rarer and more collectible, while to the south, Beaujolais began enjoying a quality revolution for its red wines. They grew weary of being stuck in between; about 15 years ago, they formed the Artisans Vignerons de Bourgogne du Sud to find a path out of the doldrums.
It was Beaujolais, and its red gamay wines, that provided one hint for a revival. Today, Maconnais red wine, mostly from gamay, has become a new bright spot, partly because gamay is beloved by younger drinkers who may never have drunk a white Macon Villages. The area’s limestone soils, very different from Beaujolais granite, provide brighter flavors and mineral aspects than vineyards to the south. There’s also pinot noir that more than holds its own with many basic Cote d’Or reds.
This is less a new twist than history repeating itself. Through the centuries, the Maconnais was predominantly a red-wine region; in 1857, the ampelographer Victor Rendu described it as dominated by red grapes (although the best-known villages, including Pouilly and Fuisse, were known for white). As recently as the 1970s, reds accounted for nearly 40 percent of production. But that changed with the white-wine era of the 1980s and the rise of chardonnay.
So there’s a lot riding on wines like Manganite, an old-vine red MaconCruzille from Julien Guillot at Clos des Vignes du Maynes. Guillot and his family, whose winery is a darling among naturalwine fans, staked their future on a long view of the region. That’s not a big surprise: His grandfather Pierre Guillot acquired the property in 1952 and helped to pioneer organic farming in France.
As for white wine, the Maconnais pulled another lesson from their neighbors’ success, both north and south — namely, the importance of trading out such generic appellations as Saint-Veran for more distinctive (and expensive) single-vineyard bottles, made with painstaking cellar work.
There’s also a more literal Burgundy influence. A handful of top Burgundian winemakers have come south, as negociants once did, to establish southern beachheads.
Is that enough to revive the region’s fortunes? Hard to say. Today, an undifferentiated bottle of PouillyFuisse is still nearly $30; single-vineyard bottlings can be even more. And local agricultural organizations have frustrated outsiders’ attempts to buy Maconnais land. They’ve also been working on a system of premier cru vineyards, much like in the Cote d’Or. On the surface, that seems like a good idea, but the French have a tendency to jump the gun on such endeavors. Is there really a market for premier cru Macon?
Either way, it’s time to shelve the old view of wines such as MaconVillages. If the region doesn’t have fancy airs, today it’s a place with more faith in its own potential, rather than one marked by insecurity about its neighbors.