Baptiste Nayrand

COTEAUX DU LYONNAIS, FRANCE

Baptiste Nayrand was working the daily grind marketing for a chemical company when he did a complete 180 and invested his life’s savings in 8.6 acres in the Coteaux du Lyonnais to make no-additives wine. The domaine, which has now grown to a whopping 15 acres, has been certified organic from its inception, and Baptiste works the land by hand without any chemical products, pesticides, or synthetic fertilizer. He plows to encourage microbial activity and uses teas made from horsetail, nettle, comfrey, and willow to reduce his use of sulfur and copper to an absolute minimum.

Anyone who knows my palate knows I don’t tout natural wines simply for the sake of their being “natural”… They have to be first and foremost delicious, untainted by the flaws associated with hasty omissions of sulfur and cellar sanitation issues, and they have to speak to the place where they’re grown. Can terroir be obscured by things like carbonic maceration and alternative vinification techniques? Sure, sometimes. Are Baptiste’s wines ultra-classic renditions of the grape varieties he farms? Not exactly—but they sure as $#!% taste like they came from vines that were carefully stewarded and are the most surprising, pure, crystalline wines I’ve tasted from the area. They’re wines that seem to have taken a page out of the Pfifferling book: infused instead of extracted, with no temperature control or punchdowns and only the rare pumpover to keep the cap wet. They are, as he describes them, que du raisin pur (“nothing but grapes, pure and simple”).