2020 Dominique Piron Morgon Cote du Py Beaujolais 750 ml

The 2020 Dominique Piron Côte du Py Morgon won 95 points and Cellar Selection honors from Wine Enthusiast, tying it with one other wine for Beaujolais’s highest-rated bottle of the vintage.

From the start, this had all the makings of a rock-star bottling: Dominique Piron is one of the canonical producers of Beaujolais, and Côte du Py is widely recognized as the greatest terroir in the revered Morgon cru.

Factor in the 2020 vintage—small in volume, terrific in concentration—and a vinification script that’s more common in $100 Burgundy than other Beaujolais, and you get a wine that earns rhapsodic reviews like the one that appeared on JancisRobinson.com: “The only word I could find was ‘magnificent.’ It tasted, felt, like black-purple silk. Like midnight. Like pewter by candlelight…A Beaujolais channeling the soul of Marrakech.”

Crafted by a 14th-generation winemaker—traditionalist Dominique Piron, who can trace his family’s history of winegrowing in Beaujolais back to 1590—this cuvée is culled from steep slopes holding the oldest soils in Beaujolais. The wines Piron shapes out of the precious Gamay grapes from this terroir possess striking structure and superb ageworthiness.

Favoring single-vineyard expressions honed by long vinifications, Piron is often grouped with other producers like Liger-Belair and Jean-Paul Brun, all of whom employ the same methods the Côte d’Or’s best producers use for Pinot Noir. 

That means using a mixture of destemmed and whole-cluster grapes and performing pump-overs every day—traditional for fine Burgundy, but a far cry from the more-common carbonic maceration found across Beaujolais. The goal, as Piron told Wine Advocate, is “a photocopy of the soil.” 

This is an attention-grabbing, serious wine, offering the best of Beaujolais—and at an unbelievable price.