Our Beaujolais wines and vintages

The winemakers at Château de Poncié have been producing authentic wines with passion and know-how for decades.
Different appellations such as Fleurie, Beaujolais-Villages Blanc and now Côte de Brouilly will delight the palate of wine lovers, connoisseurs and bon vivants.
Beaujolais wines and vintages to be discovered without any further delay.

Discover our wines

The making of wine

wine harvest beaujolais chateau de poncie

Harvest time

With pruning shears in hand and crates at their feet, the grape pickers are ready to welcome the harvest at the end of summer. Harvest begins between the end of August and the beginning of October. As every year, it is the weather that determines the best time to pick. Each of our parcels is harvested at optimal ripeness to guarantee a good balance between sugar and acidity.

The crates are then taken to be weighed on a 19th century scale in the courtyard of the château. The harvest is then kept in a cool place for one night before going through the hands of the sorters. Only the healthiest grapes are kept.

sorting of grapes for the Beaujolais harvest

Primary alcoholic fermentation and pressing

Once the grapes are ready for the big bath, they are placed in vats using gravity, in the most natural way possible (without adding yeast or preservatives).
Maceration takes place at 8°C and lasts for several days before fermentation begins spontaneously, in contact with the yeasts naturally present in our environment.
This is when the magic happens: the sugars contained in the fruit are slowly transformed into alcohol by the action of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeasts.

Our role at Château de Poncié is to intervene as little as possible and let nature take its course. We let the vat live and listen to it attentively. All interventions, from "pipeage" (in winemaking, the stamping down of the grape skins that float to the surface during fermentation) to pressing, are carried out at the request of each vat.

A daily tasting guarantees a good follow-up of the vinification. After a period of maceration, the grapes are gently pressed.

Wine maturation

After pressing, the juices are put into various tanks: wooden or concrete vats, terracotta amphoras, concrete egg-shaped casks or even barrels of different sizes, origins, and ages, so that the wine can develop a patina and improve with time.

This diversity of tanks is an extension of the work done in the vineyard where the emphasis is on the diversity of plant material, soils, exposure, altitude, management methods, plants, and animals in our environment.

During this time, the wine's tannins become rounder and release their aromas, while allowing a subtle aeration that is necessary for our natural maturation method without preservatives.

Aging in different tanks allows the wine to be more or less in contact with the fine lees.

Blending

After long months of maturing, we can carry out the blending process using the appropriate tanks corresponding to our vintages and parcels of land in order to prepare them for the packaging stage in bottles or magnums.

All the racking of the barrels or vats is done according to the lunar and planetary rhythms, in order to guarantee a good natural sedimentation of our wines.