Beaujolais, one of France's most famous wine-producing areas, cuts a narrow swath along the Saône River between Mâcon and Lyon. It is perhaps best known for the frivolity of Beaujolais Nouveau, hastily fermented from that year's grapes and released throughout the world beginning on the third Thursday of each November. The quality of the region's more serious wines is determined by their location -- simple Beaujolais in the south, the more refined Beaujolais-Villages appellations farther north, and its wines of greater complexity and depth from the 10 crus (a word that refers both to a defined region and the wine it produces) in its northernmost regions.
Jeannine explained that Domaine Lagneau, the vineyard she owns with her husband, Gérard, produces its Beaujolais-Villages wines from the vines that cover the surrounding hills. She then pointed to the village of Régnié-Durette across the valley where they grow the grapes for their Régnié cru.
Unpretentious, youthful, lighthearted -- Jeannine Lagneau is Beaujolais, seemingly living proof of the theory that people and the wine they choose to drink share similar characteristics. But then, that might be expected of a seventh-generation winemaker whose roots run as deep into the soil of these hills as do those of her vines, some planted by her grandfather.
Gérard is more reserved, a man of depth -- more, perhaps, like a cru wine. His birthplace, it seemed logical to hear, is their Régnié property where he is the fifth vintner in the Lagneau lineage.
His skin as smooth and blessed by the sun as that of his grapes, Gérard is in the field by 6 each morning, clipping the vines and tying the branches so that sunlight will reach the grapes.
