Rainbow Wines: cool julie

photo by mac parsons

Why do we identify with certain wines, certain winemakers?

This is what I found myself wondering as I started writing about Julie Balagny, a winemaker in France’s Beaujolais region.

One answer has to do with consumerism and brand loyalty; the adage, I shop, therefore I am; the formation of self around the choice made in a purchase. This phenomenon feels as real as ever on the internet.

But the consumerism answer doesn’t do justice to the meaning behind selecting a natural wine from a small maker. Partially because there’s no marketing team determining how to target your demographic. This also goes beyond values, beyond scale of enterprise. Maybe I’m just so steeped in consumerism that I think there’s something more - that I persist in thinking that the self can be reflected in its relationship to a thing it buys.

My mind moves to Starbucks. One of Em’s many genius ideas is about teenage girls and the beverage chain, which she also calls ‘the milk store.’ Adolescents use their order at Starbucks as a tool for self formation, exploration and play. Are you into salted caramel, honey almond milk, vanilla sweet cream? What size? Do you want foam or mist or whip? It might depend on how you’re feeling - Starbucks is the mood ring of taste. My own experience from age 10 - 18 going to Starbucks was like this. I went through phases, developed likes and dislikes, and I never ordered the same thing as my friends.

Liking her wines does not equal one’s unique Starbucks order, a statement of consumer self, but I do feel invested in Julie’s wines. I didn’t realize just how much I liked her wines until my friends who also work in wine started gifting her wines to me on my birthday. They heard me raving about her wines, when I didn’t realize how much I had talked about them. I looked at my little stack of special wines to save at home a few years ago and realized, wow I have a lot of these wines, and I am so happy for it. Our friend Bradford Taylor from Diversey Wine and Ordinaire and his family gave my husband and me a case of her wine as a wedding present.

The first wine from Julie that I brought into Red & White (where I was a wine buyer) is 2015 Mamouth, from the Moulin-à-Vent cru. I was able to special order it from New York where it seemed like maybe other buyers were afraid of it. A few of my colleagues liked how 2015 was more sellable to American palettes, that you could offer a Beaujolais that might appeal to someone who likes pinot noir only from central California for instance. But for the most part my wine peers liked to turn up their nose at 2015s, saying they were too big for their more discerning, delicate palettes. There’s this idea that Gamay as a grape tastes like red fruits, like cherry, strawberry, cranberry, not at all or much less so blue or black fruit like blackberry, blueberry, black currant. Mamouth tasted like blueberries and brambles. Mamouth showed this very different side of the grape variety, it had the structure of a bold and juicy Moulin-à-Vent, it may sound geeky, but this sort of novel reflection of fruit and structure was so exciting to me.

Language means a lot to me so I’ve probably read more than I should into how she named this wine Mamouth - just what it was, Beaujolais in a bigger body. To embrace that without expressing some hesitation, without needing to impress this particularly masculine brand of snobbishness that sneers at warm vintages, thinking them too lush, too curvaceous, struck me. The illustrations on each of her bottles are done in black and white watercolor, many made by Dauphine Chauvin. Her system of giving some wines discrete names indicates her investment in their expression. Some wines she makes almost every year if the weather allows from a certain vineyard, such as En Remont. Some like Sex Appeal originate in specific vintages, sometimes blends of different sites.

Julie’s wines are always expressing Beaujolais and her cellar. With all the really hot years we’ve experienced recently due to climate change, even a winemaker as experienced and sensitive as Julie makes wines that need a little while to rest before they come into their own. We are cellaring some 2019s now. Yet even with the heat, Julie’s wines never taste like a big Grenache or Carignan, like some of her peers in the Beaujolais and the Loire, they always feel like Gamay. I think this may have something to do with her management of lees and sensitivity to ferments, but I’m just learning more about this, reading Max Léglise’s Vinification et Fermentation at a snail’s pace to try to understand.

In the shop right now, we have an outstanding wine from Julie, O Bella Ciao 2017. This is a different kind of vintage to 2015, cooler in general, although this wine also feels fairly full and generous of fruit and body. There’s a bit more airiness and floral quality to this wine than Mamouth, to a wonderful effect. O Bella Ciao is an Italian protest folk song, originating with the Modina, the seasonal rice workers who were women, who faced atrocious working conditions, long hours and very low pay led to constant dissatisfaction. This led to riots in the early years of the 20th century. O Bella Ciao was adapted by the partisans into a world war two anti-fascist protest song. It is a folk song for the people, not the padroni, the bosses. For the modina, O Bella Ciao referred to saying goodbye to your family every day for many hours, having to leave them to face sometimes sixteen hour shifts in up to their knees weeding the rice fields. The lyrics

Alla mattina appena alzata

o bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao, ciao, ciao

alla mattina appena alzata

in risaia mi tocca andar.

E fra gli insetti e le zanzare