Château du Moulin-à-Vent stands beside the stone windmill, built in 1550, that gave this corner of northern Beaujolais its name. Records of the estate go back to 1732, when it was known as Château des Thorins. It took its current name in 1936, the year Moulin-à-Vent was decreed one of France’s first AOCs. In 1911 the property sold for the first time in its recorded history, to Julien Damoy, who also grew grapes in Chambertin Clos de Bèze. His heirs held it until Jean-Jacques Parinet and his son Édouard bought it in 2009. Winemaker Brice Laffond joined them in 2013, and the Parinets then did three things. They replanted underperforming parcels from their own massal selection. They began farming organically that same year, with certification arriving in 2024.
They mapped roughly thirty hectares of old gamay vines into twenty-three distinct terroirs. The vines are planted at 10,000 or more per hectare, against an appellation minimum of 6,000. They average 27 hectoliters per hectare, less than half the legal limit. In the cellar, the grapes pass over two sorting tables and ferment with about a third whole clusters, one pump-over a day, and temperatures held below 77°F. There is no carbonic maceration and no added sulfur. The Wine Advocate’s David Schildknecht judged the estate’s holdings likely the finest set of parcels in the appellation, and Wine & Spirits named it one of the 100 best wineries in the world in 2017, 2020 and 2021. Its three single-vineyard wines, Champ de Cour, La Rochelle and Les Vérillats, all come from sites Moulin-à-Vent submitted for premier cru recognition in 2024.
La Rochelle spans 4.2 hectares at 280 meters, near the top of the appellation on the upper reaches of the Vérillats mount’s south slope. It faces full south and sits in a corridor where the wind runs almost constantly, keeping the fruit clean and concentrating the berries. The soils are deep granitic sands threaded with clay. The gobelet-pruned vines are more than eighty years old. The 1874 Budker classification of the region’s vineyards placed La Rochelle in the first class. In 2020, after a sunny, early season, the harvest here ran from August 20 to September 8. Thirty percent of the wine then aged in French oak and the balance in steel for 18 months before bottling in March 2022.
Wine Enthusiast’s Roger Voss rated the 2020 95 points, praising its density and the immense potential of its fruit and structure. The estate says La Rochelle can be austere in its youth, and at six years old this vintage is just beginning to open. There’s Morello cherry and bilberry, dried strawberry, leather and smoke, then white pepper and clove over silky tannins and a briny, granitic finish. Drink through 2038.
