Discovering the Mâconnais (1) the southern outpost of Bourgogne
I’ve spent the last few days in the Mâconnais, the southern outpost of Bourgogne (or Burgundy as it is known widely in English). Like many discovering wine in the late 1990s, for a long time I regarded the wines of Mâcon as affordable expressions of Chardonnay, but not serious wines.
My mind was changed by encountering some of the star domaines, and some newcomers, such as Bret Brothers (Domaine La Soufrandière) here , Domaine Robert Denogent here and Domaine de Thalie here. These were clearly serious wine and showed the potential of the terroirs here. So I thought it would be time to make an in-depth visit, to see what’s going on.
This is a beautiful region. It’s a strip some 10 km wide running 35 km from north to south, with rolling hills, plus two distinctive cliffs: the guardians of the region. These are the peaks of Solutré and Vergisson, in the southern end of the Mâconnais. The region has 4223 hectares of vines in 89 villages, with 345 of these red grapes (Pinot Noir and Gamay). The rest is Chardonnay. There are 850 growers.
The subsoils here are 200 million years old and are sedimentary, based on limestone. The hills in the region run parallel, and are interspersed by faults and limestone ridges. Vergisson and Solutré are crinoidal limestone that is harder, and hasn’t been eroded. In the south of the region the soils can be a bit sandier with lots of clay and even some granite (we are right next to the Beaujolais crus here); in the north, there is more marl and sedimentary limestone.
One factor that has turned the light on this southern outpost of Bourgogne is the ripple effect. The rising tide of prices in the fashionable addresses further north has led people to begin exploring outside the Côte d’Or (the term used to describe the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune). There’s renewed interest in the Côte Chalonnaise and the Hauts-Côtes, but now the Mâconnais is in the spotlight. And from the evidence of this visit, it is beginning to deliver, although this remains a major source of decent but unremarkable cheap unoaked Chardonnay.
Increasingly, there is a focus here on single-site wines. Go back 15 years and this would have been rare: it’s the Mâconnais, or so people thought, and there’s no point in talking about terroir. Even in the co-ops, though, you will now find the concept of cru being used to sell wine. This was illustrated at our first stop, the cooperative Terres Secretes, where in the saleroom there were displays with the wines, labelled by village and even lieu dit, shown alongside glass cylinders containing the soil profile the wines came from. Some people might call this clever marketing: borrowing terroir to add prestige to wines, without the wine necessarily displaying distinct sensory characteristics of the soil. I’m sure that in some cases this is true. But it’s important to see this change in mindset.
This is a region where the co-ops play an important role. 60% of the production comes from co-ops, with 40% from vignerons. But the co-ops here (I visited three of them) seem to be doing a solid, and in some cases more than solid, job.
I asked Jérome Chevalier, winegrower and head of the appellation, what the strengths of the region were. His response: good value for money, with good and consistent wine quality. Most Mâcon wines aren’t passed through barrels, and there is a diversity of terroirs, with different expositions and soils. And retail prices in France range from around €8-15, which makes them an attractive proposition.
‘There has been a big change over the last 15 years,’ says Jérome. ‘Before it was more homogeneous. Yields have decreased a bit and people have been doing their best to increase the quality of the wines.’
How does the region work? At the bottom end of the hierarchy, we have simple Mâcon white and red, and also Bourgogne Rouge and Blanc. Then we have the Mâcon-plus wines, with the name of the village appended to the name. There are 27 different villages that can do this: previously there were 45, but they realised this was too many, and so some were merged together. It’s also possible to use lieu dit names on labels. These all fall under th
The 27 Mâcon-plus designations:
Azé / Bray / Burgy / Bussières / Chaintré / Chardonnay / Charnay-Lès-Mâcon / Cruzille / Davayé / Fuissé / Igé / Lugny / Loché / Mancey / Milly-Lamartine / Montbellet / Péronne / Pierreclos / Prissé / La Roche-Vineuse / Serrières / Solutré-Pouilly / Saint-Gengoux-le-National / Uchizy / Vergisson / Verzé /
As well as Mâcon, there are village wines: Pouilly-Fuissé, Pouilly-Loché, Pouilly-Vinzelles, Saint-Véran, Viré-Clessé. And now we have the 20 premier crus of Pouilly-Fuissé, which were awarded in 2020. A similar process to delineate Saint-Véran premier crus is underway.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting lots of producer profiles here.
