Marcel Lapierre - Great Wines and A Great Example to Others.

10/11/10

We mourn the passing last night of Marcel Lapierre, producer of delicious Beaujolais and a great influence on wine-makers around the world who learned from him, and from his mentor Jules Chauvet, how to make wines without artifice and with respect to their terroirs and traditions. We offer a few quotes from an interview with M. Lapierre in "Le Vin Au Naturel" by Francois Morel. "The method of winemaking - one could say "natural" of the past disappeared between 1960 and 1980, aside from a few of the ancients. I started in 1973 and I practised the modern method learned in school. Pick early, sulfite, add sugar, it was the golden rule. The first time I met Jules Chauvet , he told me "The two beasts of the Beaujolais, they're sugar and sulfur!" It was after 1980 that I wanted to make wine like my grandfather, but with the scientific learning of Jules Chauvet. "Natural" wines, they're wines by vignerons who work like their grand-parents, not in a manner of the past, but in a manner of understanding and intelligence. Natural wine, it's not a doctrine, it's an ideal: the ideal, it's to vinify without additives, respecting the terroir - the place where the grapes come from- and the vintage."