There isn’t too much to cover here that most of you won’t already know. Jean Foillard (“Fwa-lah”, not “Foy-yard”) is one of the greats – not just for Beaujolais but for the French wine industry as a whole – starting his career as one of the disciples of French winemaking legend Jules Chauvet (together with Yvon Métras, Marcel Lapierre, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet), he and his wife Agnès have been working their vineyard in Morgon together since 1980.
What seperates Jean Foillard from the rest is his attention to detail, his clarity, and his purity. There is no intervention between his organic vineyard and what goes to bottle and only the cleanest of fruit makes the cut. The wines are incredibly site-driven, speaking only of their vineyard (schist, granite and manganese dominate) and their vintage. In warmer years, such as 2015, the wines show a darker fruit spectrum, but not enough to deter from the mineralic backbone that the schist and granite provides. They’re brooding, serious wines that never disappoint. Forget varietal typicity, these wines show complete and utter producer typicity. No one else is close to as pure an expression of Côte du Py than Jean Foillard!
