Beaujolais: The wines of Fleurie offer more

YEARS from now, when the history of Beaujolais is written, it will be fascinating to see how the wine is portrayed over the first part of the 21st century.

Will that period, 2000 to 2020, be perceived as a turning point - the era when the wine finally shed its reputation as joyous but inconsequential? Perhaps it will be remembered as the time when prices went through the roof and top Beaujolais became unaffordable.

Or maybe Beaujolais finally came to be recognised during that time as encompassing many different sorts of wines, from mass-processed to honest; refreshing and smile-inducing to complex and thoughtful, yet still joyful.

Beaujolais long has been typecast as simple, easy and thirst-quenching. Wines like these may have been epitomised by Beaujolais Nouveau, which began as a regional ritual celebrating the first wine of the harvest and became a global craze in the 1970s and '80s. But Beaujolais had that reputation long before Nouveau left its dominant impression.

In his essential 1988 book, Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France, Kermit Lynch wrote of speaking to old-timers, who recalled "real Beaujolais" as light and tart, and quoted Richard Olney, the food and wine writer, describing its flavour as "a rush of green fruit".

(What a curious description, and what fruits did he have in mind? Greengage plums? Green apples? Gooseberries? Green figs? Or did he mean unripe?) The wine they remembered was necessarily light and lively, maybe 11-12 per cent alcohol, Lynch suggested, to accompany the heavy, rich cuisine of Lyon, the city that legendarily is situated at the confluence of three rivers: the Rhône, the Saône and the Beaujolais.

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It's still possible to find refreshing Beaujolais on the simple end, or at least wines that live in that same spirit. Lapierre makes a wine, Raisins Gaulois, that carries the Vin de France appellation but comes from Beaujolais. It's juicy, fruity and pure, and I imagine it would be deliciously refreshing with blood sausage, tripe and other essentials of cuisine lyonnaise.

Wines labelled simply "Beaujolais" would also fall into that bright, lip-smacking territory, especially as good producers reclaim this appellation, the lowest category in the Beaujolais hierarchy, underneath Beaujolais-Villages and the Beaujolais crus, 10 appellations judged to have the potential to yield superior gamay grapes. They are, in order from north to south: St.-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Régnié, Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly.

Our focus for the past month has been on Fleurie. As always, I suggested three bottles to drink. They were:

• Clos de la Roilette Fleurie Cuvée Tardive 2019, US$29

• Domaine Chapel Fleurie Charbonnières Vieilles Vignes 2018, US$37

• Jean-Louis Dutraive Fleurie Domaine de la Grand'Cour Clos de la Grand'Cour 2019, US$39.

These are not inexpensive wines, certainly not if they were the sort of jolly, casual bottles for which Beaujolais has long been known.

Let's be clear: I am not demeaning simple, delicious wines. I revere them and always have a place for them. But cru Beaujolais are not those wines. They offer more to taste and more to think about. Yet they are not solemn wines. Good gamay wines, no matter how they are made or where they come from, always seem to have an intrinsic element of joyousness.

While these three all come from Fleurie, they were nonetheless distinct. The Cuvée Tardive from Clos de la Roilette comes from old vines, and generally improves with a few years of aging. Yet even drinking it young, as we did, it was fresh, expressive and calm, both fruity and floral with touches of citrus and a chalky minerality, maybe even a touch of Olney's green fruit, as in greengage.

Flamboyant in its flavours

The Dutraive was strikingly different. It was flamboyant in its flavours, with a pronounced floral quality that reminded me of violet pastilles. It also had a touch of effervescence, perhaps because a little carbon dioxide is added to protect the wine as Dutraive uses very little sulfur dioxide as a preservative.

You'd expect the Chapel also to differ, as it comes from the weightier 2018 vintage while the other two were 2019s, a vintage in which the wines seem to be brighter and fresher. True to the vintage, it was denser, more concentrated and less energetic, yet also with an earthy, violet flavour that was both pretty and intriguing.

I asked people whether they thought these wines were floral, as the wines of Fleurie (which means flowery in French) are almost reflexively described that way. I found the Dutraive and the Chapel particularly floral with their violet flavours, less so the Roilette.

But I'd nonetheless be cautious about generalising. A lot of wines, including other Beaujolais crus, can be described as floral. I think in this case the description speaks as much of an association with the name as it does an indelible characteristic of Fleurie.

The conventional wisdom is to drink Beaujolais young. As I recently enjoyed an exceptional 2005 Morgon Delys from Daniel Bouland, I would say, of course these wines can age. I would put away the Roilette and the Chapel without hesitation, though I'd be more inclined to drink the Dutraive young. Just because a wine can age does not necessarily mean it should be aged.

As with any wine, when you drink it is a matter of taste. Cru Beaujolais just so happens to be versatile enough to enjoy young and aged. The Clos de la Roilette in particular, I think, will be even better in two or three years. The Chapel will improve, too. But from then on, it's a question of personal preference.

The great thing about Beaujolais is that you can have it many different ways because it's not just one type of wine. NYTIMES