Burgundy may be the spiritual homeland of Pinot Noir, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other places around the world capable of elevating the grape to greatness. The same goes for Gamay: Its motherland may be Beaujolais, but today’s wine from the French/Italian Alps is right up there with the best examples we’ve tasted. It is also, like our favorite Cru Beaujolais wines, a colossal value so if there was ever a time to venture off the beaten track, today’s the day. 

You certainly couldn’t ask for a more fascinating place of origin and backstory: Located in the tiny Valle d’Aosta region of northwestern-most Italy, in the shadow of Alpine peaks like Mont Blanc and The Matterhorn, the Institut Agricole Régional is the local school of enology and viticulture, which, like many other Northern Italian agricultural schools of its ilk, makes and markets its own line of wines. Not only do they produce delicious, critically acclaimed wines from the school’s vineyards, they give you a master’s thesis worth of information right there on the wine’s label. If you speak Italian, it’s a great read, but ultimately the real story here is what’s inside the bottle: juicy, berry-fruited Gamay with a profound chord of minerality running through it. It has the tension and lifted aromas one finds in the best Alpine reds (like those of France’s Savoie), while also offering a hat-tip to Beaujolais greats like Morgon and Fleurie. Much as we (and you) love those Beaujolais greats, this borderland beauty demands a hearing—or, rather, a tasting.

The Valle d’Aosta (or Vallée d’Aoste in French, which is also spoken here), consists of a single, mountainous province in the Dora Baltea River Valley. From its source on Mont Blanc, the Dora Baltea runs almost due east through Valle d’Aosta before dipping southward in neighboring Piedmont, where it eventually hooks up with the Pò. It’s a cavernous valley, with mountains rising on either side, and the east-west orientation of the river means that most of the vineyards in Valle d’Aosta are arrayed on terraces on the Dora Baltea’s north bank, with southern exposures. This enables them to take in sufficient sunlight to ripen grapes in this cool Alpine climate, where vineyard altitudes climb to some of the highest elevations in Europe. While the region’s reds are typically taut and high-toned in style (think of the great reds of the Savoie, on the other side of the Alps), there’s plenty of wild-berry fruit to complement the deep minerality imparted by the region’s morainic (glacial deposits) soils.

The specifics of today’s 2018 Gamay (as detailed on the label) are as follows: Its source vineyard is a southeast-facing parcel situated at roughly 750 meters, in soils of sandy moraine. It is 100% Gamay fermented and aged in stainless steel only, and like all the wines the IAR produces, production quantities are tiny: just 5,300 bottles of this ’18 were made.

So, in addition to being a pitch-perfect expression of Gamay, it is also an extraordinarily well-priced rarity. In the glass, it’s a deep ruby with the slight magenta reflections that usually characterize young Gamay, with aromas that wouldn’t be out of place in a Beaujolais cru like Morgon: blackberry, Damson plum, raspberry, violets, wild herbs, cracked black pepper, and crushed stone, all of which carries over to the medium-bodied palate. There’s more tension here than in the typical Beaujolais, but there’s no lack of fruit concentration, either: it is vivid and juicy, with the minerality most prominent on the finish. Splash-decant it 15 minutes before serving in Burgundy stems and, given the French leanings of the region, pair it with something like coq au vin, steak au poivre, or, if you want to drill down deeper on its place of origin, fondue. Valle d’Aosta is the Fontina cheese capital of the world, so give the attached recipe a try when you’re ready to uncork a bottle. It may well be the first of many!