Domaine de Robert – Patrick Brunet

Patrick learned to crawl, then walk, then gallop over its ancient volcanic sediments, while his parents taught him what mattered in life: respect, honest work, and love for others. When he was seven years old his father took a big risk. Parlaying their hard-earned success on the Côte du Py, Robert bought five hectares in Fleurie—just in time for the washout vintage of 1970. In a flash, everything was hanging by a string. Another hailstorm or ill-timed frost could send it all tumbling, if the bank didn’t snip the thread first. But Lucie held firm as a bastion of moral support, the extended family rallied, and 1971 proved one of the best years of its era. Robert adopted a refrain that echoed through Patrick’s childhood: “The sun shines for everyone,” he liked to say.

But not, alas, forever. In October of 1981, a sudden cancer tore through Robert’s body and ended his life. Patrick was 18 years old, studying enology at an agricultural lycée. Now he faced his own moment of reckoning. He could have let his mother rent out their vineyards. But instead he left school to stand at the helm. He’d always imagined that he’d follow in his father’s footsteps. “I just did not think I would take over under such circumstances.”

It was a tricky time for Beaujolais. Nouveau had become a mass-marketing juggernaut, coloring the entire region with a reputation for trifling confections. Without his father to guide him, Patrick found himself in a position of daunting but fortuitously timed independence. Free from filial pressures and perhaps too young to be cowed by market dictates, “I started from a blank slate to create the style of wines I wanted to have.”

He traveled to the Napa Valley and the Santa Lucia Highlands, and later to Piedmont, which he regarded as “the small Burgundy of Italy,” refining his vision. He arrived at a style he calls “semi-Burgundian, semi-Beaujolais.” From Burgundy he adopted total destemming of the harvest, aiming for pretty fruit unmarred by green notes or unripe tannins. From Beaujolais he followed the custom of macerating and punching down the cap.

Patrick’s cellar work highlights the quite distinct qualities of his father’s original plots in Fleurie and Morgon, where the vines date as far back as 1930 and Patrick stopped using pesticides in 2000. The estate’s small size allows him to conduct precise tastings and phenolic analysis to harvest each block of Gamay at its peak. The granitic soils of his Fleurie vineyards—where clear days reveal the snow-clad face of Mont Blanc in the east—impart a feminine grace and minerality to the lifted fruit, which gains length and aging potential from sections rich in decomposed pink sandstone. The Cote du Py cuvée hums with peppery spices above a richer, rounder, and darker palate—products of the blue stone and shale that distinguish that vaunted hill from the rest of Morgon. 

Yet there’s an unmistakable stylistic continuity to these wines, which braid classic Gamay delicacy together with an uncommon depth. And forty years after taking the reins from his father, Patrick’s holdings remain unchanged: two hectares in Morgon and five in Fleurie are the perfect dimensions for a farmer who insists on being present at every stage of the process and attentive to every subtle shift in his vineyards. 

After all, the sun may shine for everyone, but the vine grows in the shadow of the winemaker.