Chénas « La Fayarde » 2022

Cheerful, ravishing wines, full of grace and personality. All these are adjectives that can be used to describe amazing wines made by winemakers who already have a certain experience, with several years of accumulated harvests, something that allows them to get the best out of the grapes they have, which are subsequently going to be improved by the way they are handled in the winery. In this sense, Laura Lardy is like a paradox.

Because her first vintage is from 2017, when she was only 27 years old. Today, at the age of 32, she already has a solid reputation because of her aesthetic interpretation of the region where her 5.5 hectares of leased vineyards are located: Beaujolais. The vineyards were rented from her father, who is also a producer – Laura is a fourth generation element of a winemaker family –, and they are located in Fleurie, Moulin à Vent, Morgon Côte de Py, and Chénas and Beaujolais-Villages. Besides gamay, she also grows chardonnay with both cuvée, white wine direct press and one maceration Orange.

By the time she work the vineyards from her father in 2017, Laura made the immediate decision to work the land according to organic concepts, for if she had always sought to respect the environment in her daily life, her winemaking approach could not follow a different path. And this is how Laura manages to enhance and highlight the versatility and organoleptic capabilities Beaujolais’s grape par excellence: the gamay.

Laura makes around 30 000 bottles annually (with negoce I make the Gourde à Gamay- Beaujolais Villages); in the cellar, she uses the region’s famous technique, (semi) carbonic maceration full bunch/grappe for the gamay. Chardonnay, however, is directly pressed. The wines are vinified in cement tanks and aged in old or neutral oak barrels of different volumes. Fermentations occur naturally with indigenous yeasts and no chemicals are used, except for a minimal amount of sulfur at bottling. Her wines see no filtration or fining.