Damien Coquelet is one of France’s most exciting young guns and we are featuring his most electrifying wine. Many sommeliers can still recall about a decade ago when Damien burst into the collective Burgundy/Beaujolais-geek consciousness. At a mere 19 years of age, he emerged seemingly out of thin air with his inaugural 2007 vintage and proved to the world that, apparently, teenagers could bottle soulful, serious, and freaking delicious red wine.
Over the eight years that followed, Damien stayed humble, quietly honing his skills in the cellar and vines while avoiding the temptation to cash in on rushed growth. And now, at the wise old age of 29, Damien Coquelet is bottling some of our favorite wines in Morgon. Today’s offer hails from the Côte du Py—arguably the single most important vineyard site between Burgundy’s Côte d‘Or and the Rhône Valley. This is only the second time SommSelect has been offered enough of Damien’s extremely limited wines to share with our customers. So, we urge you to experience one of France’s great, ancient terroirs in the hands of one of its brightest young talents.
This wine was raised in what has become a single-address epicenter of extraordinarily pure and soulful wine. Georges Descombes, his son Kevin Descombes, and his stepson Damien Coquelet all bottle wine together under one roof in the cellar of a farmhouse in the tiny, rural hamlet of Vermont, just 45 minutes due north of Lyon. It’s a difficult house to locate and there is no tasting room or obvious signage. I was actually stood up during my last attempt to visit, but that did nothing to diminish my adoration for the property and its impressive roster of talent. The truth is, you can pull the cork on any one of the numerous hand-labeled—and often bargain-priced—cuvées that emerge from this address each vintage and you will be thrilled. There is never much of any one bottling to go around but each wine speaks with clarity and brilliance, and the formula is both uniform and simple: Start with organically grown Gamay clusters from old vineyards, ferment with no additives of any kind, and bottle the finished wine with little—and often zero—sulfites. This is as pure, healthful, and effortlessly delicious a wine as we will offer on SommSelect this year.
Still, we all know that great wine is made in the vineyard and I would be remiss for not sharing a few thoughts about the legendary hillside that birthed this wine. I came of age in an era when Beaujolais was often derided as an unsophisticated and disposable “beverage,” pale in comparison to its northern neighbors in Burgundy and those just south in the Rhône. Yet, Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon, Alain Coudert’s Fleurie, and Jean Foillard’s Morgon from the exact same hillside as this wine—the Côte du Py—were so alive, so deep, and so moving that the global wine community had no choice but to eventually embrace Beaujolais. And today, these are some of the most treasured wines in sommeliers’ cellars and personal collections. Unlike many far costlier Village and Premier Cru Burgundies, these wines deliver every time. And in this entire beloved region, no hillside is more celebrated than the Côte du Py. This ever-crumbling slope of granite and schist takes the already thrillingly chameleonic Gamay grape and imbues it with an extra dose of energy, directness and intensity. The Côte du Py is a mandatory landmark as you travel the French wine atlas in your glass and today’s wine proves why.
The 2015 Damien Coquelet Morgon “Côte du Py” has a dark ruby center that remains consistent out to its ruby and pink rim. Extraordinarily bright aromas of plump red cherries, wild strawberries, fresh currant jelly, strawberry leaf, white flowers, fresh cut roses, and crushed white stone explode in the glass. This is an invigorating and exciting wine fresh out of the bottle; it’s irresistible. The wine’s palate is a frontal assault of three-dimensional red fruit, crunchy and delicate young tannins, and a broad finish that stops perfectly on a dime, begging for the next sip. As with all top-tier Beaujolais, this bottle will mature flatteringly over the next 5-7 years as it becomes more subtle, savory and exotic. Still, if you don’t enjoy a bottle now, you may be eluded by the fundamental energy and freshness that makes these wines such a joy to drink in their youth. My ultimate dream scenario for this bottle is to chill it slightly, decant it, and pour into unpretentious all-purpose glassware while sitting in a back corner at the Spotted Pig in Manhattan at 1am. But let’s be honest—I have a mortgage, I’m not 25 anymore and that’s not happening anytime soon. So, as a close second option, I encourage you to
join in me in recreating that same burger. If you’ve never enjoyed a perfect burger in between gulps of cellar temperature Beaujolais from a great producer then you haven’t lived. Live a little! Cheers.
