Jean Foillard Beaujolais Villages (750ml)

Jean and Agnès Foillard took over his father’s domaine in 1980. Foillard has 14 hectares of vines; most of their vineyards are planted on the Côte du Py, the famed slope outside the town of Villié-Morgon and the pride of Morgon. These granite and schist soils sit on an alluvial fan at the highest point above the town and impart great complexity.  

The great terroir was just part of Foillard’s success. Early on, Jean began to follow the teachings of Jules Chauvet, a traditionalist who defied everything that the more commercial brands were touting in the region. Jean and three other local vignerons, Marcel Lapierre, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton, soon joined in on the movement and became known as the Gang of Four, as importer Kermit Lynch christened them.  They called for a return to the old practices of viticulture and vinification; old vines, never using synthetic herbicides or pesticides, harvesting late, rigorously sorting to remove all but the healthiest grapes, adding minimal doses of sulfur dioxide or none at all, and refusing both chaptalization and filtration.