Wineshark Wine Tasting - Domaine Longere

We visited this domaine in the summer of 2018, and honestly this visit was probably my most memorable winery visits in my life. Shortly after breakfast and finished packing at our hotel, the owner of the estate, Jean-Luc Longere, came to pick us up at the hotel.

Riding on his car we came to his vineyards. This family estate is now in the sixth generation, located at the heart of Beaujolais in the municipalities of Perron and Vaux-en-Beaujolais. The estate cultivates 5 hectares of vines in the Beaujolais-Villages appellation, in the hillside area, facing south and southeast. The soils are granite.

The vines are grown in goblet, the pruning adopted for Beaujolais-Villages and Crus du Beaujolais. All the bunches are harvested by hand, and all the wines are bottled at the property.

The particularity of their operation is that for the sake of respecting the heritage and the environment, since 1987 the vines are grown with a set of cultural practices aimed at obtaining grapes, then quality wine, through limited human intervention on the whole ecosystem.

Jean-Luc shared with me the reason they did this arrangement and it was a great story. The grandfather and father of him, seeing the damages incurred by the proliferation of pesticide and herbicide to the vineyards, decided to adopt this natural limited intervention approach.

I have personally witnessed the vibrancy of life in the vineyards, at the diversity of insects and plants, the competition in the vineyards between the rows of vine and the weeds and other vegetation, and honestly everywhere I went there is a natural energy making me feel good and comfortable. A truly amazing experience of how successful the domaine practices this philosophy and seeing the results.

We had a great tasting of some of the whites in the middle of the vineyard, before continuing the hike in the hillside to the edge of the forest, where Jean-Luc had set up a table for us to enjoy a picnic lunch, with some wonderful food prepared by the hotel and some nice wines he brought along.

We then went to his cellar and continue to sample some of his wines. The estate make a wide range of wines, including Beaujolais Blanc and Cremant de Bourgogne from Chardonnay, as well as using the black Gamay grape variety with white juice to vinify both Beaujolais-Villages Rose, the Rouge, and since 2007, a sparkling rose wine of the ancestral method.

I decided to buy a bottle of their special, amphora-matured cuvee called Jarre. Producing only 500 bottles in 2016, this wine is an attempt of Jean-Luc to use a traditional method to make the wine. Saving it till today, the wine certainly is delicious, with nice cherries, raspberry and sweet plum aromas, supplemented with violet, sweet spice and earthy notes. With good acidity, lively and vibrant, the tannin is ripe and provides a nice body and structure to the wine, finishing well with a nice length.

It is my wish that I can return again to have further interactions with Jean-Luc, and if possible joining him in the harvest and winemaking in future, to learn first-hand from him.