Chiroubles Aux Cras is a single vineyard plot in Chiroubles, the highest point in Beaujolais. With an average vine age of 40 years, the wine produced from the vineyard combine the very best to be found in Beaujolais. Made with no fining, filtration nor additional of SO2, this is a wonderfully pure and complex Beaujolais made by Pauiline Passot, who is an exceptional talent.
Aux Craz is a south-facing vineyard at the top of the village. Its poor thin soils and elevation mean that ripening takes longer, and the resulting wine is fresher. Stems give a cool green note to the spicy dark fruit in this linear, with a wonderful richness and complexity, way beyond most would recognise as a traditional Beaujolais. Beautifully mature, this is drinking wonderfully now.
In the short time since taking over her family's estate, Pauline Passot has made a name for herself as the producer of high quality, balanced wines that are very expressive of their terroirs. One of her first steps was to begin conversion to organic methods. Her winemaking is traditional: fermentation is in a mixture of steel and 600-litre casks, there is little destemming, little extraction and a low fermentation temperature. It is the precise attention to detail that makes her wines shine.
