"You won’t find over-the-top candied fruit bowl flavors in the wines of Domaine de la Chapelle des Bois. The junk-wine industrial techniques (enzymes, cultured yeasts, stabilizers, god knows what else) that make so much Beaujolais into a sea of drab, homogenous, tarty, not-found-in-nature mediocrity are avoided like the plague here. Farming methods and vinification are historically accurate for the region, and more similar to the techniques employed at better addresses in northern neighbor Burgundy than in Beaujolais’ massive wine factories. It bears noting that only the appellations Bordeaux and Cotes-du-Rhone rival in volume the tremendous amount of basic Beaujolais AC bottled annually. Fleurie is a drop in the bucket, Domaine de la Chapelle des Bois even more so. But I think in these delicious drops lie the potential salvation of a region whose reputation is sullied by errors of the recent past, and whose fortunes are on the wane. It seems likely that the immediate future of wine in France lies in restoring the distinctions and fastidiously-tended character that created the nations’ unparalleled reputation for quality to begin with: a task I’ll summarize as bringing terroir back to the table."~(Importer's Notes)