2025 Domaine Chignard Fleurie "Les Moriers"

Kermit Lynch went looking for Fleurie in the late 1970s because people kept telling him about one vineyard, Les Moriers, and when he climbed to the top of it he found Michel Chignard’s house with the winery underneath. The Chignards have farmed it for four generations, as tenants until they finally managed to buy the walled heart of it, the Clos des Moriers, and Michel’s son Cédric has run the domaine since 2007 with his father still living on the property. Les Moriers is an arrowhead-shaped parcel on steep south-facing granite that juts right down into Moulin-à-Vent, and the name comes from the mulberry trees (“mûriers”) that once grew there. The vines are old gobelet Gamay, averaging sixty to seventy years, planted at a dense 10,000 per hectare, and the whole eight hectares gets the same treatment: hand harvest, whole-bunch fermentation on native yeasts in a mix of steel, cement and big old wooden tanks, then 13 months in old foudres. The result is what made the site famous in the nineteenth century: the violets and rose-petal perfume of Fleurie sitting on the stony, tannic frame of Moulin-à-Vent. It’s a Fleurie that ages like a Moulin-à-Vent, and if you want proof the site is charmed, it has been spared by hailstorms that flattened the vineyards around it more than once.