Jean-Paul Brun, Beaujolais à l’Ancien, 2010

Jean-Paul Brun's Beaujolais à l’Ancien, 2010, is a fruity red wine that is full of sour cherries, raspberries, redcurrants and citrus notes. The fresh and juicy fruits of this lovely Beaujolais lead to a refreshing and lively drink. It is fermented in the traditional Burgundian style rather than the more contemporary carbonic maceration that, although popular and easy to drink, lacks the depth that Gamay wines can display.

'The slightly more serious ‘Cuvée L’Ancien’ is vinified in a more northern Burgundian manner, with some pre-fermentation cold-soaking of the grapes and a light ‘pigeage’ to extract extra colour, flavour and structure from the skins. The wine is bottled some months later than the previous wine and has much better potential for interesting development in bottle. It can sometimes resemble a pinot noir wine after a few years in bottle.

'No other region in the world seems to be bothered to try and excel with the gamay grape, and yet a good gamay wine is in my view a much better bet than an ordinary and more expensive pinot noir. I hope that Jean-Paul’s wines will show why we think so. His rather restless, inquisitive, demanding nature has made him a maverick thorn in the flesh of the ‘gratte-papiers’ at the Institut National d’Appellation Controlée and their subsidiary fraud squad by whom he is regularly persecuted on the grounds of making wine that is ‘atypique’ for the region. It is of course precisely because his wines are so much better than what has become typical that we admire them so much and have bought them with such enthusiasm for nearly twenty vintages.' Mark Savage, master of wine.